I guess I remember reading about sexual harassment in Japan being more common, like women getting groped on the subway and stuff. But yeah, to be honest, I don't really know why the idea is my in head that they are less feminist now that I think about it.
This did get me thinking on how you would quantify feminism in a country. There are things like the Global Gender Gap Report and the Gender Inequality Index, but I am generally pretty sceptical of these types of reports, because they tend to oversimplify the matter at hand. For what it's worth, the Global Gender Gap Report has the East Asian countries a bit lower than Western countries but the Gender Inequality Index has Japan and South Korea right up there with Western European countries.
However, my argument might still stand with other examples. Eastern European countries tend to have low birthrates as well, if anything usually lower than Western European ones. Although it is anecdotal, I do know some people from various Eastern European countries and have discussed cultural differences with them and as best I can tell, countries like Romania, Bulgaria and Ukraine all have low birthrates as well despite having generally much more conservative ideas about gender roles than say Sweden or the Netherlands.
shamgar
1yr ago
shamgar
7mo ago
Japan, South Korea and China aren't exactly bulwarks of feminism compared to western countries and yet they have even lower birth rates than most European countries.
shamgar
3mo ago
Europe seems to be the opposite of what you suggest as a solution, but as far as I can tell it's also way more successful in dealing with homelessness and the problems it can cause than the USA or apparently Canada.
shamgar
1yr ago
Your mention of Solzhenitsyn peaked my interest a little, but after having looked at it for a bit as far as I'm concerned it's not difficult to acces at all all. It has a pretty big wikipedia article. It's been translated to German and French. In German it looks like you have to get it second hand (although you can find offerings easily) and in French you can just buy it on amazon. And apparently they're working on an English translation due next year.
There are also other works by Solzhenitsyn which haven't been translated to English yet by the way, not just the one that's about Jews.
shamgar
7mo ago
I was writing a reply about my anecdata that led me to the view that Eastern Europe is less progressive about gender than Western Europe, but when I was trying to fact check some related claim I wanted to make I stumbled across the Eurobarometer about Gender Stereotypes. Quickly scanning through some of the results, it doesn't actually seem like there is a clear trend of EE being more or less sexist than WE.
shamgar
1yr ago
To be clear, this is very much not going to be a steelman of their beliefs because I'm trying to describe a failure mode in a couple of sentences. The problem is mostly that they can be overly passive in certain ways. There is a common doubt about whether one is part of the elect in these communities and a fatalistic attitude towards this, because it's all God's grace and they can't do anything about it. This is caused by a combination of an extreme emphasis on personal conversion and an extreme emphasis on predestination which leads to people doubting whether they are saved because they did not have the right type of personal conversion experience and their response is waiting and hoping that they will someday be converted by God.
The overly strong emphasis on personal religious experience can be problematic in itself, but it is especially toxic in combination with a type of Calvinism that pretty much only allows them to use verbs in the passive mode when discussing spiritual matters and anything other than God is the subject. There are churches in the Dutch bible belt where you will find a thousand people twice a Sunday, but only a third or less of confessing members will feel like they are true Christians and for instance won't participate in the Lord's Supper, because they feel like they haven't really been converted yet. People will in some sense live like faithful Christians all their life, believe God exists, believe they are sinful and need salvation from God, believe Jesus died to bring about that salvation, etc. but at the same time they will tell you they haven't been converted yet and maybe they are just not part of the elect and will go to hell and then continue just wait and hope that their salvation may someday come to pass. In my view, they can just convert if they want to, God's grace is already at work in them in fact that they even want to be converted. Or maybe they already are converted and they don't have to doubt their salvation because they didn't have the right type of religious experience.
Again I'm not doing justice to these communities because I am zooming in on a particular problem that affects them. The problem is not solely caused by Calvinism but it is definitely exacerbated by a particular application of Calvinism.
EDIT: I just realized the "they" in your post might refer to either the Dutch hypercalvinists that I mentioned at the end of my post, or Luther and Calvin. I wrote my post interpreting it is the former. If purely looking at Luther and Calvin, I think it is more of a theoretical problem and not super important. I don't feel the fatalism I described in my post affects them. The reason I do have a clear preference for using the free will language, contrary to Luther and Calvin, is because of the fatalism I see in some Dutch reformed churches around me, which I think would be undermined by a clearer view of free will and also because I feel it undermines some caricatures of Reformed theology.
shamgar
1yr ago
This view is correct as far as I can gather from the book I linked to. Albeit with the caveat that John Calvin himself and Luther did reject the idea of free will. That being said, the book presents authors who for instance contributed to Reformed confessions and are all influential figures in the Reformed tradition, so I think it is reasonable to say that the Reformed tradition had a view similar to what you describe, even though Calvin himself did not.
shamgar
1yr ago
I have also noticed I enjoy less some of the places for online discussion I used to frequent. I have asked myself whether it was the discussions that have changed or my perception of them. A general trend of declining quality does match my experiences I think, but again I cannot tell whether I might be a bit burned out with online discussions or whether the discussions are burning out.
shamgar
1yr ago
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by 'esoteric points of high theology', but personally I really enjoy https://mereorthodoxy.com/.
shamgar
1yr ago
I don't know what film you're referencing, so I can't attest to that, but personally I had more fun visiting Bruges than visiting Brussels. I think Bruges still has a reputation in Belgium itself of being a bit touristy, but it does have a large beautiful historic centre. I might be a little harsh on Brussels, it does have some nice historic areas, but given that it's the most famous and biggest city in Belgium it just felt a little underwhelming and at least anecdotally when I visited there myself it also felt overcrowded. Bruges also gets plenty of tourists, but it has a large historic city centre and at least when I visited there, the tourist crowds weren't quite as bad as Brussels.
shamgar
1yr ago
While I can understand why people think red is the obvious choice, but I really struggle to understand why some people seem to have such a hard time imagining non-cognitively impaired people choosing blue.
You presuppositions which together I reckon are sufficient for choosing blue:
- A strong preference for the outcome where no one dies. For instance because you believe human life has an intrinsic value.
- You assume that some people will pick blue. Even if they might think red is the obvious choice when properly considered, maybe they had a brainfart, maybe they misread the poll, maybe their mouse slipped, etc. That's not even considering the fact that for whatever reason people might consciously choose blue.
There's also a weird meta element where I think both of those presuppositions are pretty normal and hence would expect a lot of people to vote blue and if I expect a lot of people to pick blue, that only makes point 2 more salient.
Again I understand why people might not agree with this reasoning, I don't understand why it seems to be so unimaginable that somebody might genuinely hold this position to some Mottizens.
shamgar
3mo ago
Houston seems to be quite successful with the housing first policy indeed, although providing housing for homeless people isn't quite the same as deregulating housing. Deregulating housing probably does make it cheaper to provide housing for homeless people, so fair enough. Houston isn't the only place with liberal gun laws, so I'm not convinced gun laws have anything to do with it though.
I tried looking up some statistics for a bit to check my intuitions in homelessness overall, but the statistics seem to be not very straightforward. For instance, the list on wikipedia for countries by rate of homelessness has the USA at 19.5 per 10.000 people and France at 48.7, however the table also a column called 'unsheltered per 10.000' and there USA scores 12, whereas France scores 4.5. So I have no clue whether France or the USA has more people living on the street now based on these statistics. I've never been in the USA personally, but I have been to lots of places in Europe, including non-touristy bits and not so nice parts of various towns and I've never seen a fent zombie or anything like that and I've never been harassed by a homeless person beyond obnoxious begging and I do know various Europeans who were shocked at the amount of (visible) homelessness when traveling to the USA. Whether there are more or less of them I do not know, but homeless people anecdotally sure seem to cause more problems and be more visible in the USA, despite the USA's liberal gun laws. I don't know that much about housing regulation in the USA, but I certainly would not describe housing in my own country of the Netherlands as deregulated.
shamgar
1yr ago
I have recently passed 30 so it might be ageing is a part of it, but I guess I hoped significant deterioration of my immune system to start later than my early thirties. I did also get covid for sure once but probably twice. If it does have a longterm impact on the immune system that could very well be it.
shamgar
1yr ago
To be clear, I agree that Luther and Calvin were more concerned with a moral sense of free will as you put it in another post. Actually in the conclusion of "Reformed Though on Freedom" the authors of the book touch on this topic as well:
We can distinguish between the religious intentions behind playing down free choice and working this out in an explicit ontology. Given the context of the Reformation, it is quite understandable that Luther and Calvin combated the idea that man is free to work out his own salvation, although with divine help. The moral and spiritual consequences of sin are at stake, and in this respect the Reformers rightly teach the total corruption of man.
So yeah, the view of the book which I think I agree with, isn't that Luther and Calvin were completely wrong and later generations of theologians fortunately completely rejected their view. Rather, Luther and Calvin correctly emphasized the corruption of fallen man over and against a more optimistic view of human nature that was common in the late Medieval/ early Modern period, but in doing so they made some statements that have unfortunate philosophical consequences. Later generations of theologians had more or less the same idea about the spiritual and moral consequences of sin, but were a little more careful and nuanced in working it out philosophically. While, to be clear, I don't think this should lead us to a negative view of Luther and Calvin at all, I don't think it is a completely theoretical point either. I know at least in the Netherlands, where I am from, there are some very conservative Reformed groups that fall into some sort of hyper Calvinism who would benefit greatly if they were told that contrary to popular belief, people like Gomarus and Voetius believed in free will.
shamgar
1yr ago
I also think this is rather tricky and don't know how to deal with it. To complicate matters further I also don't want to err to much in the other direction where you completely disregard everything a certain source has to say because it made a dumb mistake once while it might still have plenty of worthwhile things to say.
shamgar
1yr ago
I'm not super knowledgeable about the issue, but I'm inclined to him in a negative light. As I understand it, he played an important role in moving Europe from cabinet wars to total war.
Given the historical distance, we maybe can appreciate a romanticised Napoleon as a military genius in the way that people think Vikings or Caesar are cool. But if we take a more serious look, I don't see how Napoleon can be seen as a good or even morally neutral person outside of French nationalistic hero worship or Raskolnikovesque nihilism.
shamgar
1yr ago
Care 83%
Loyalty 69%
Fairness 92%
Authority 64%
Purity 64%
Liberty 75%
Strongest moral foundation is fairness and I got matched to conservative.
However, I do score much higher on care and fairness than a typical conservative apparently. Actually, except for the libertarian on liberty I score higher or (almost) equal on every moral foundation compared to any of the profiles. I don't know how good my morality is, but I sure do seem to have a lot of it.
shamgar
1yr ago
Does anybody have tips on interesting stuff to read in French? Fiction, non-fiction, articles, books, blogs, anything goes.
I've always been interested in languages and enjoyed studying them, but I've never had quite the discipline to commit to one and learn it to a high level. Now I want to just commit to one language for a while and learn it properly. Because I already have some basic knowledge of French and I have a trip to France planned coming spring, I figured French would be the best candidate to start with. Just looking to get some more sources of input.
shamgar
4mo ago
What do you make of martyrdom in light of that view? It seems to me that favouring morality over survival has worked in the past at least in some instances and at least some martyrs have had quite a say in morality.
shamgar
1yr ago
As for vitamin D, sleep, alcohol consumption and stress, I don't think there is a significant change in between the earlier period where I barely got ill and the past year where I caught colds/flu multiple times.
shamgar
1yr ago
Yes, because of Easter. Also, I saw an argument about the moral impact of Christianity somewhere and that got me thinking about things like slavery and infanticide in the Roman Empire. Being a Christian and that playing an important role in my daily life pretty much makes sure I think about it in passing pretty much every day.
But what if an upstanding and polite civil society is the very thing I want to preserve? Ratfucking the Democrats simply means joining them in tearing it down. If I want to preserve traditional Western morality and institutions, I don't see how surrendering my political movement to a libertine billionaire with autocratic tendencies is going to help me win that fight, however skilled he may be at winning elections. In the short term it might improve a few issues because he will give some political quid pro quo pandering to actual conservatives, but I find it hard to believe surrendering a political movement to a figurehead who is hostile to its very principles is the winning play to bring about those principles.
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