urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
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User ID: 226
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
15hr ago
· Edited 15hr ago
I'm a zoomer.
I've had a lot of trouble getting friends to hang out and keep to a set time and place to meet up. Actually, as I think about it, women I've gone on dates with have been better at showing up than my male friends have been at keeping to a hangout time. That said, when friends don't show up, they generally call or text and have an excuse (sometimes a good one, sometimes something you can tell they made up off the cuff), while when dates don't show up, they ghost about half the time, and the other half is split between "has a good excuse and agrees to reschedule" and "has a good-sounding excuse and never indicates a desire to reschedule," with the latter presumably indicating a lack of desire to move forward with the connection.
I had some friends in the neighborhood when I was growing but none of them were good people -- my parents are white-collar professionals but the neighborhood is on the wrong side of town and very working-class, though there isn't violent crime and I never felt unsafe. The neighbor kids to the left tried to steal from me, the girl across the street nearly got away with stealing from me, and the neighbor down the street gave me the sense of a schoolyard bully. I consider that it may not be a good idea to be above the socioeconomic average of the neighborhood, much less to be seen as such.
The kinds of things you see depicted in old movies and TV shows -- meeting friends from the neighborhood, schoolyard playmates, sleepovers, friends calling each other for hours in a night and taking up the phone line, knocking on your friend's door and showing up unannounced, coming over for tea a drink, neighborhood barbeques... none of these really reflect any of my life experience. It seems nice to have that kind of thick social community.
I guess it's a combination of two things. First, Anglo culture in general is more reserved about hospitality than Southern European, Latin, Middle Eastern, Eastern European, Asian cultures in general. I can't speak to the careful divisions in Europe, but what I see online suggests the English are more hospitable than the Danish, but less so than the Spanish.
But the English at least have a tradition of having someone for tea, whereas in the US someone comes over and unless a party was prepared for the standard beverage is "uh, I think I have like a flat 2-liter of Diet Coke in the fridge." Americans pour a lot of social emphasis into the event, the party, the special occasion, and there are high expectations indeed for cleanliness, decor, even theme -- the neurotic curse of the middle class. I presume that poorer or more socially transparent cultures are more comfortable with a relaxed attitude towards socializing and entertaining, without the expectations of having a tip-top living space. "Keeping up with the Joneses" runs deep in the American consciousness.
Of course, it's regional, and temperament-based. My aunt from Oklahoma has a large family room and a dining room with many tables, and she has cousins and neighbors and church members and people I don't even recognize coming in and out of her house every time I visit her. She's gregarious, and socially transparent, and you go to her house, and you're family.
She's also a landlady, and most of her work is maintaining her properties (she's a landlady who cleans and maintains the properties herself, sometimes enlisting my cousins to help), so she's home much of the time, and can be socially transparent because she invests much of her time into cleaning and maintaining her home as much as her rentals.
That's probably the biggest explanatory factor -- people's homes and entertaining have traditionally been the provenance of the homemaker, and contributing to third spaces, leading private societies, entertaining guests, and general hospitality were the recognized space for women to hold up the social order. With the entrance of women into the workplace and the two-income trap that makes this a requirement instead of an option, the intertia of middle class entertaining expectations on top of working feels to many like exhaustion rather than pleasure.
"I'm working a 40-hour job, caring for the children, and maintaining the home all at once and my husband doesn't help" (the "double burden") is almost a stock phrase in "why I divorced" stories, and to stack the expectations that people feel about properly entertaining guests on top of those tasks means they're the first to get cut. Not to mention the tension that men and women working 40+ hours a week leaves very little time for anyone to socialize, stacking children on top makes that harder, and then everyone is exhausted and who wants to go do a thing when you could not do a thing, or catch up on sleep over the weekend?
Women from cultures where there is a greater division between men's and women's roles, even if the women in question work or live in a western country, tend to follow that blueprint, and so entertaining and maintaining social connections are higher on the priority list. It isn't irrational the patterns that have occurred, and most people are cutting what I also would cut given the constraints people have been handed, but there are knock-on effects like the decline in entertaining and hospitality.
Mass media also contributes significantly: first radio, then television, then video gaming, now the internet. I'm sure some critics of mass entertainment (which were probably women's groups -- women have been talking about social issues much longer than they've been voting) at the introduction of each of these technologies were sounding alarms about how in the future people wouldn't talk to each other any more, and society would degrade as a result. Cyberpunk as a genre is partially a sustained criticism of the concept of being 'jacked-in' to media at the expense of flesh and blood.
And while the warnings of critics are often overblown or exaggerated, they often have a seed of prescience, even one that is never realized or acknowledged until the time is far too late.
It's easier to entertain yourself now than at any point in history, and when people can entertain themselves, 'entertaining' others feels like effort unnecessarily expended. And given the crunch on time I explained above, why would anyone expend effort unnecessarily?
When the magic internet rectangle supplies nearly endless content, literature, social concepts, news, and parasocial connections with people far brighter, more gregarious, and more attractive than anyone in your immediate social circle, why would anyone go outside and touch grass, or stop to chat with the neighbor? What do I, an introverted Catholic-lite who quotes internet memes the way my forefathers quoted the Bible, who's more familiar with esoteric technical specifications than local restaurants, and whose opinions are so far outside the Overton window they might as well be called defenestrated... well, what do I have in common with my fundamentalist Pentecostal neighbors who hate the Catholics nearly as much as the gays? About what am I supposed to talk to them? The weather? That sounds far less pleasurable than throwing internet comments out into the void at all of you.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
1d ago
I’m a socio-cultural anthropologist, and these people who are philosophers or whatever feel completely comfortable criticizing a discipline they don’t really understand. I would never do that.
Genuinely the job of philosophers to critique the fundamental basis of things, but okay.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
4d ago
The ones who expect foreign travel are hard to locate? Or the ones who don't?
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
4d ago
I guess maybe this is another thing where my background influences what I've seen, but as far as I can tell I've never been on a date with a woman who had this kind of lifestyle. Especially the "looking for a man to offer that almost seems like looking not only for a provider who can add meaningfully to the dual household income, but looking for a man who can bankroll an entire lifestyle, and I've genuinely never encountered that. Together we can afford these lifestyle choices is familiar to me; marriage after all has financial advantages. But this is the sort of thing that appears deep into a relationship, not up front.
Is this a lower-middle-class/upper-middle-class split thing? Regional? I've tended to date people who come from modest households.
Well, if roystgnr nominated me for an AAQC, I nominated you. While I'm not certain the difference between players and connectors is completely discrete, they probably do cluster bimodally. And of course players aren't immune to long-term commitment for the right person, though I do worry about the foundation that game playing lays for the future of a relationship.
Perhaps that goes to explain my own experiences at the party school. Where, of course, I ultimately met my match (that sounds more ominous than I intended), but not before feeling confused and played by the young woman I talked about in my first comment. When I look back on things, I think she was surprisingly honest, but presumed physical closeness without an invitation of intimacy functioned as one. You could think of this as a shit-test, but perhaps more truly it was a Type-B signal that my Type-A brain read correctly as loading all the risk in my direction, because that's how the Game is played according to the Rules.
On the other side of the fence, one of the strange problems of being a geeky Type-A man dating geeky Type-A women is that, through whatever correlative associations (autism, neurodiversity in general?) drive it, geeky women are often not merely demisexual but asexual. Or they may be confused about their sexuality, which may be a little weird, in the same way in which male geeks are just a little weird.
But an "I'm totally autistic, I have way too many hours in Baldur's Gate 3, my life goal is to pet as many cats as I can, my hobbies include making my own cosplay, I geek out over anime and manga" girl who decides the cutest pic of herself consists of her in a piano-keys themed skirt -- yes I'm thinking of someone I know in particular here -- well, that kind of girl exists, and sometimes she would like a man to have sex with her. (And sometimes girls like that write tentacle porn fanfiction, but we're not going to talk about that right now.) And if Skulldrinker could become legible to her not just as charming bartender but as geeky charming bartender, I'm hopeful.
Often a girl like that is chubby, though. It comes with the territory. "Doesn't get out much, plays video games all day, not outdoorsy, not into foreign travel"... this kind of person would be described as "having a sedentary lifestyle," and the medical literature describes that as a pretty strong correlate of metabolic disorder. The only people I know like that who aren't at least a little chubby have a medical condition or some kind of eating disorder. So it really, really narrows the pool to focus on weight to the exclusion of personal compatibility, and bland dates with thin people who do nothing for you can often be the result.
And yeah, they're often politically liberal. But sometimes not. The more common configuration is politically moderate, doesn't like Trump, cares more about treating people well than solving political problems. Liberal women are what they are, and it is humorous if a little alarming to hear a date say "I would never trust a white man" while she's staring into your white-ass eyes with longing, and even funnier when she subsequently makes a joke about something looking like Trump's hair and then apologizes for getting too political, as though making fun of Hair Force One is more controversial than racial bias.
For what it's worth, I think the tension between Type-A women and Type-B men is what contributes to a lot of the "I'm trying to avoid the redpill creeps" stuff you hear from young women nowadays -- it really is not a fun time to end up attached to a strategically withholding seducer as a basically honest person looking for a meaningful connection.
But the challenge, as always, is that people with a large enough amount of power -- and the attractive, dashing, and beautiful have a great deal of power within their sphere -- are always tempted to play by the rules of the game by which they win, and it strikes me as a real fact about the dating world that the most attractive cohort of people are more likely to withhold and hold out for a 'better deal.' I've never had specific interest in the 'hot girls', but maybe my impression that they're not looking for something meaningful says more about my place in the looksmatch pyramid than any inherent fact about the attractive.
Every piece of relationship advice suffers from survivorship bias. "Just be yourself" became such a big piece of advice for two reasons -- first, that putting on an act, while possible, is extremely psychologically expensive, and if you're trying to reassure someone nervous, telling them to stop looking at themselves from the outside and instead try to inhabit the moment from the inside is a much more fruitful piece of advice that might actually result in chemistry and charisma. And second, because the best and happiest relationships result from connections where "just be yourself" really is the method of making an impression. Someone who finds you charming for who you are is far more likely to find you amenable over the long term, and history is written by the winners.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
7d ago
It's a social anxiety avoidance thing, and I've done it for general hanging out, not just dates. I've gotten better at it, and the "regardless of whether it goes well, it's a time to meet someone new" attitude has become more comfortable for me as well.
I guess the nerve of asking out and the nerve of actually going on a date are different. I feel fight or flight the day of a date, like can't sleep, shaking, staring at the clock, extremities going cold because of a rush of blood to the core. One of the two options there, of course, is flight, and "the unbelievable relief of cancelling plans" is a meme among late millennials and zoomers for a reason.
And with online dating, the asking and the going have moved even further apart -- it's much, much easier to say, "Let's go on a date" to a Greece travel picture over text than it is to actually show up, face the risk of awkwardness or embarrassment, and take a chunk out of your vegetative TikTok time to encounter someone who might judge you. I genuinely believe most last-minute cancellations are of this type. Most women simply aren't as strategic as the dual-mating discourse makes them out to be, and the current crop of young people are, by every measurement we can find, more anxious than any other cohort we've measured.
An uncomfortably large proportion of "why is my girlfriend doing this?" behaviors that men often complain about (silent treatment, inconsistency, asking a question like "would you still love me if I were a worm?" and then reacting seriously to the answer, reassurance seeking) are just anxiety behaviors that are painfully familiar to me from the inside. They aren't good, and they certainly aren't healthy, but they're very rarely strategic, and if they accomplish something for the person they do so in the short term, the way all maladaptive behaviors persist. Avoiding long-term beneficial behaviors for short-term benefits is the failure mode of anxiety. Some of our female posters have talked about avoidance being a huge part of young people's socialization problems. That's very much the case.
You know, sometimes when I read accounts of dating by other men I feel like I'm reading text from an alternate universe.
That goes for the successful ones as well as the unsuccessful ones. First dates that end in sex are as strange and alien to me as a first date that ends in a proposal of marriage. I don't know that I've ever been on a first date where sex afterwards seemed countenanced, like something that would even make sense in the context. First dates in my world are a "getting to know you" kind of experience, like "is there chemistry here, can we have a conversation that we enjoy together?" Generally, they've ended with a warm hug and a promise of future engagement, typically one that has either gone forward or been closed off by my own choices. I've never kissed someone on a first date. It's just never seemed to be the appropriate thing to do, a reflection of what the date was about. The second date is where you kiss them romantically under the stars. My romances have been slow burns. Good burns. But slow burns.
Actually, I've never paid for a woman's drink on a first date -- but I'm more of a coffee shop kind of guy, and the one time I offered to buy ice cream for someone on a third date they declined it, and then bought me a soda at the end. Wining and dining is not really my style, and I can't say that anyone I've dated has ever expected it to be.
I do recognize things in your history that I've experienced. I've been stood up before. The "Excited to see you tomorrow!"/BLOCK chain is very familiar. But that's also a minority of cases in my experience. Far from 90%. Most women I've dated have shown up. Some definitely haven't. And I've had a few times where I cancelled last minute based on nerves or disinterest -- I'm not proud of it, but I've done it. People are flaky in general, and I've been stood up more times by friends I was supposed to meet up with than by dates I was supposed to see. But the shape of what you're describing is very real to me, and I believe you. The fact that it's almost everyone has to sting a lot, especially after the feeling that they projected such excitement about you.
I want to emphasize the word "projected." What strikes me about your accounts is how front-loaded the excitement in your matches and connections have been.
You're so funny, [affectionate emoji], I'm really looking forward to meeting you, I'm excited for [day], awww you're so sweet.
after texting someone is, to put it politely, an extraordinary amount of certainty about someone you haven't met. They don't know enough about you to think you're "so funny," or "so sweet" -- you said some things that were funny or sweet, but so little of a person's personality comes through text that it strikes me these women were perhaps more excited by the idea of you than by the possibility of you. I mean that: sometimes the mental image and validation of a handsome, 5'11", funny guy who gives you compliments is more compelling than the possibility of a future with him. The first date is where the mental image has to meet reality. And also, where your mental image of her does, and for some of these women that might have been the scarier part.
Sometimes the problem with being a bartender is that a bartender gets left at the bar.
You suggest something close to this yourself:
I got it into my head that they were giving themselves cold feet by building up what they thought were too-high expectations.
And yeah, I think you might be right. Sex on a first date is pretty intimidating, particularly for women, and it does sound like many of these women felt that was within the realm of possibility, including on her side, and those kinds of stakes are scary, even if it's never been your intent to project them. But for many women even "heavy petting" sits on the "sex" side of the ledger.
When I think of the times I've been cancelled on last minute or stood up, almost all of them followed the development of real sexual tension or body-forward flirting (hence, no first dates with sex). When I think of the times I've had a pleasant first date, almost all of them followed personal curiosity, interests-work-and-hobbies conversation, and warmth. What stands out to me in your account -- and again I can't see all these situations in their entirety, I just see how you describe them -- is that your engagement with these women, on both sides, is almost entirely unpersonalized. "I get paragraphs from her about how hot I am and the stuff she likes doing to guys" is, like, the most generic sense of flirting possible. Nothing in that was about you, about anything unique to you, about something that would plausibly make someone specifically want to see you, and not Unidentified Male #9.
And, of course, "the bare minimum of communication to arrange a date" is not exactly a personalized level of flirting, either, and neither is generic "I am a Charismatic Man" banter. I know this is a degradation of what you've done before, and it must get so exhausting putting personalized and thoughtful messages out there when the world sends you so little back. But there are costs to the degradation, because like a coin flip or hiring a lawyer, past results do not guarantee future outcomes, and every new person could be the one who deserves your best.
All this is part of the reason, by the way, that women talk about "love bombing" as a problem, and why many are highly suspicious of "you're hot" sexual compliments as a flirting strategy. Both flirt without really seeing the person first. "Hot" describes someone as an interchangeable sexual commodity that can be dropped at a moment's notice ("just actually go on a date with the hottest guy out of the five(+) who've asked you out" is an analysis of this phenomenon from the male side), and "you're so sweet and funny and amazing and wonderful and I'm soooo excited to see you," to someone you don't know (or barely know), almost by definition can't be based on a fully accurate experience of reality -- it has to be based on a projection.
Projections can be well-intentioned or ill-intentioned, but they aren't a good foundation for a relationship that can take root and grow. The seed that falls in shallow earth sprouts quickly, but is soon scorched and withers.
I don't know that you're responsible, entirely, for the outcomes you've had. None of us are. And your experiences do strike me as a string of bad luck.
But I do notice some things about the way you describe your dating history that stand out to me.
The first is that you actually seem to have had a few good experiences, but you have some reason to describe them as bad. A woman goes on a date with you every few months, but she's "way fatter than her photos indicated," she compliments you for your decisiveness, and you treat the date as though it's nothing. Not even, "attraction isn't there, glad I found out," but "too fat." I guess it's hard for me to understand the visceral disgust a lot of guys express for fat women; I can understand the lack of attraction, but the disgust is hard to fathom. I've been on good dates with fat women, and bad dates with thin ones. And even when the attraction isn't there, I feel good that I got out of the house and got to talk to someone who was interested in learning more about me.
Another time, a woman who laughs at all your jokes, kisses you, and agrees to a second date gets described as "plain-looking but not fat", not getting your jokes, leaving no impression, and "being bored out of [your] skull." You realize this is kind of a jerky way to describe a woman you went on a date with, don't you? You didn't even explain how the second date, the one where everything was closed, ended! You pivot in your retelling immediately to your ex, almost as though this woman, who genuinely did more in your telling than 90%+ of women to show interest and treat you with respect, never even deserved the closure of being described fully in the time she chose to spend with you.
The personalized-vs-generic dichotomy shows up here, too, of course. The feelings you had for Maggie seem like the real deal. "Someone who I was just in awe of, as a person." She doesn't get "plain-looking but not fat," she doesn't get "pretended to get my jokes," she doesn't get a story about buying too many drinks on your tab. Maggie's the only woman in your story who appears as more than just "gender/parenthood status/attractiveness/BMI." Your feelings for her were personal, embodied, not generic, not simply erotic charge. And you didn't meet her for vodka-sodas or "music late in the evening," you met her, married, at a D&D table, possibly the least likely place to meet someone you'd fall in love with.
It must have destroyed you when she left, and I'm so sorry.
I keep thinking of the essay Scott wrote on LessWrong about how people self-select so profoundly that sometimes their experiences of the world are almost irreconcilable.
People self-select into bubbles along all sorts of axes. Some of these bubbles are obvious and easy to explain, like rich people mostly meeting other rich people at the country club. Others are more mysterious, like how some non-programmer ends up with mostly programmer friends. Still others are horrible and completely outside comprehension, like someone who tries very hard to avoid abusers but ends up in multiple abusive relationships anyway. Even for two people living in the same country, city, and neighborhood, they can have a “society” made up of very different types of people.
Finally, some people have personalities or styles of social interaction that unconsciously compel a certain response from their listeners. Call these “niceness fields” or “meanness fields” or whatever: some people are the sort who – if they became psychotherapists – would have patients who constantly suffered dramatic emotional meltdowns, and others’ patients would calmly discuss their problems.
I believe in your experience of the world. And I believe a lot of things about men's bad experiences with women -- I've seen shades of game-playing, inconsistency of interest, shit testing, the works, enough to believe they're real, and the flap of a butterfly's wings would expose me to a lot more of it.
In some ways, I feel a bit like the feminist Scott describes in the article: "The woman I quote above mentions that she’s a feminist who believes discrimination is a major problem – which has only made it extra confusing to her that she never experiences any of it personally." (I guess for me it's not a never thing, but the ratios are off.)
I also need you to believe in mine, because mine is the evidence that yours isn't the only kind of experience you can have with women.
Sex on a first date genuinely confuses me. Heavy petting on a first date confuses me. Agreeing to meet someone in the middle of a Saturday night out confuses me. Receiving paragraphs of explicit sexual texts from a woman I met in passing confuses me. I don't disbelieve you. But it does feel like our worlds might as well be alternate universes.
(I'd say tending bar confuses me, but I grew up in an evangelical teetotaler household, and still even after leaving the denomination that preached against alcohol, I still don't drink but once a month, if that.)
This isn't disapproval, necessarily. But it's confusion, like being handed a dessert menu when reporting for jury duty.
And it's temperament, the same way I can't go to bed before 2 AM and am so resistant to nap that my father had to pick me up from preschool before naptime. I'm wired for slow burns, and I'd be wired that way in any culture, under any incentives, against the gradient if it has to be.
I think you're wired that way too, and I think your own post proves it.
Run Maggie through the hunter rules. She was married when you met her. There was no flirtation window, no escalation timeline, no enthusiastic messaging to evaluate. A system designed like clockwork to convert matches into notches would have filtered out the one woman who it sounds like you genuinely loved. You didn't run her to ground. She turned up on your doorstep because of who you'd been at the table for months. You don't grieve a "plain-looking but not fat" woman with a ranking out of 10 for five years, you grieve a person. Everything in your post says your actual type isn't a body specification; to use your own words, it's being in awe of someone. Which means the hunt was never your game, and becoming a better hunter won't fix your problem.
But look at who you've been pursuing, and how.
A woman who dropped, unprompted, paragraphs about "the stuff she likes doing to guys" -- but obviously didn't have the courage to say anything to your face, an unstable interaction from the moment she used a fake lost-item report to turn a passing encounter into explicit fantasy. A date you can't remember a single sentence from, despite there being a second one. Women who appear in your own retelling as a weight, a look, a rating, a political vibe, because that's genuinely all that was ever exchanged.
You're seeking the most personal thing that exists in the least personal register that exists, and then you're experiencing the interchangeability, and its attendant disposability, as betrayal.
But I understand why the personal angle might hurt, too. I think I recall you mentioning another girl in an older post, the one who kissed you on her birthday and got very mad at you about it. That seems like the only time in your recent history where you got close to the kind of feeling you had for Maggie, and then everything came crashing down. This strikes me as a time when, maybe, there was some level of miscommunication, mis-signaling, that caused you both distress. Maybe she ended up perceiving your kissing as a physical escalation designed to drive more physical escalation, reading your desire as predatory before reading your love as real, because of the implication. Or maybe she was just inconsistent, or her own flirtations with asexuality made her confused about her intentions as much as yours.
Maybe Chicagoland is like this. I come from Jesusland; Peace be with you. And I do wonder, just a bit, if the differences in culture explain a lot of the divergences in our accounts. Most of the women I've dated have been Christian in background, even if presently secular, and more than a few have come from rural or small-town backgrounds. Casual sex was not a big happening at my school, though I heard about some such reputations later on, and when I went off to a major party school for college, I was struck by how different the vibe was romantically and sexually. And it was there that I first encountered the game-players, and one woman, in particular, who insisted after a first date that she "wasn't really ready to date right now," and then followed this up, two weeks later, by inviting me to her dorm and seemingly expecting some kind of a move. I don't deliver escalation to the inconsistent, and if you're not really ready to date, I'm not really ready to fuck. I'm not a booty call.
My own "why are all the women like this?" experience is I have a strange penchant for pulling the inexperienced, from my teenage years (where this is statistically the norm) to adulthood, and if all of my dates had a common theme it would be "introverted, doesn't get out much, haven't dated much before." I can only imagine that whatever unconscious vibes I broadcast have something to do with that, though it's hard for me to see how, or why.
This is wild speculation, so take it with a grain of salt. But I wonder if part of your unconscious self-selection, the part neither you nor I can see from your posts, is that your vibe broadcasts something you're not actually pursuing.
You're a bartender. You've done stand-up. You dress fashionably. You're handsome, you've lost weight (and things have gotten worse since then!). Your default register is charge, banter, performance, charm. That register reads, to a lot of women, as sexual pursuit, which would explain the strangest pattern in your account: women preemptively negotiating sex with a guy whose actual ceiling is making out.
That would explain the period texts, the "hope you're not expecting anything," the nerves, the hookup-coded nightlife meetups. Those women were responding to an intent you say you don't have. If that's right, it's the most fixable problem in your whole post, because nothing about you would need to change except the signal. You're not broadcasting "looking for another woman like Maggie." But by your own account, that's the only broadcast you've ever actually meant.
It might be worth one experiment before you write off the apps. Run the D&D table version of yourself inside Hinge. Answer the weird prompt, ask the question only she could answer, don't propose a date until you're actually curious about a specific person. And if curiosity never comes, don't propose one at all. See if genuine warmth or personal curiosity exists for you in text. It might not. But you've never actually tested it. You've been testing charm, which is a different vibe altogether, and it's not the one that gave you Maggie.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
9d ago
What's strange is this is happening on the same day that Lindsey Graham suddenly dies, almost like McConnell wanted to present himself as continuing to be a part of Republican control of the Senate after Graham threw the SC Senate race into disarray with his death.
That said, I don't love that we're having geriatric senators stay on through major health concerns.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
17d ago
Yeah, the mini size. There used to be cans about the same diameter as standard cans but shorter, but they replaced those with the mini ones. I’ll be honest in saying that those are much closer to a serving of soda for me. Without ice I just get sick of the syrupy sweet well before I could finish sipping a 355ml can.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
17d ago
Well now it’s me that was confused because I was thinking of those 20oz bottles when I talked about vending machine and pizza parlor sodas. I guess I’ve vaguely seen soda bottles between them and the 2-liters in size, but I don’t know if I’ve ever bought one.
The unit conversions are getting to me now, lol. I’m not certain why the US denominates small soda bottles and cans in fluid ounces and large ones in liters.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
17d ago
Yup, they trip you up in that way. "That's way too much soda for one sitting!" "Well read the label, it has OVER THREE servings in it!"
Yeah, those are bought sometimes, but not as commonly as 12 oz ≈ 355 ml cans. But the smaller bottles are common at businesses or vending machines, where it's tacky or unexpected to buy a can rather than a bottle. So for instance a pizza parlor might offer a choice between a 2-liter or a 1.25 liter. (Also, 12 fluid ounces is much less than 1.25 liters.)
I've never been a fan of the 2-liter bottles because you have to use them quickly or they go flat, but they're bought commonly for parties, cookouts, as a way to get a lot of soda for several people at once.
Interestingly enough cans closer to the 500 ml can size in the US are associated mostly with energy drinks, only rarely soda. And of course there's the Arizona tallboy with 23 oz ≈ 680 ml, but you wouldn't buy a soda in that size.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
18d ago
I know conservatives who hate cops (or at least think they’re buffoons). But conservatives who go, “we gotta get this big government under control!” and then lick boots completely bewilder me.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
19d ago
“Pastoral insensitivity?”
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
19d ago
More than 50% of the United States and nearly 50% of France voted for Donald Trump or Marine Le Pen, whose views are not so far away from those of Mohammad Ben Abbas’.
Excuse me, what? Do you really believe this?
And notably the Eastern church is the only one that the Catholics (at least now) consider a real, proper church on a near-peer level. But I don't think it's representative and certainly SSPX isn't on that level.
On a near-peer level, that's true, because they're both Chalcedonian. But there are more than one eastern churches.
The "real, proper church" thing (I assume you're referring to the "Church" vs "ecclesial community" split) has to do with the sacramental priesthood and episcopacy rather than doctrine specifically, and generally most of the Eastern churches are considered to be on the same side of that line. Eastern Orthodoxy, Oriental Orthodoxy, the Church of the East, despite their Christological differences, all have a general sense that priests are performing a liturgical sacrifice of the Eucharist to God, which is the requirement Catholicism sets for being a "Church-Church."
Anglicanism is in an interesting category because there are priests and bishops, and the Eastern Churches are relatively warm to them on that basis, but the longstanding view of Catholicism is that Anglican orders are null and void because the Church of England, especially in the 15-1800s, relativized its understanding of what the priesthood was to more of a ministry in the Protestant sense than a sacrificial office, while the Eucharistic sacrifice was described as a "sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving" (added to the first BCP communion rite by Cranmer). Both of these I know are described by modern Anglicans (except Anglo-Catholics, who've always jumped through hoops to try and make Anglican theology more Catholic than it ever was) as explicit steps of separation from Catholic theology and alignment with the continental reformation.
There's an alternate universe perhaps where Edward's minority didn't give Cranmer an in to push his agenda, or Elizabeth had a desire to impose more of her own liturgical conservatism and insisted on maintaining sacrificial priesthood as a pillar of the English establishment, and in that universe the Church of England would probably be called a "Church" by Catholic doctrine. Henry VIII was extremely Catholic in theology, and if his six articles had survived the test of time, the world may well be quite different.
Historians who study the history of Anglican sacramental theology agree fairly strongly that the CoE genuinely developed a different understanding of these elements, and so I think Apostolicae curae was a solid interpretation, even if the subsequent "we're not going to call protestant churches "churches" thing just annoyed people.
The main reason SSPX isn't on the same level is they don't want to be -- they want the "we are doing things without the Pope because the Pope is doing heretical things" without the "we are the True Church" baggage, which is obviously rather unstable. Technically speaking, the SSPX also doesn't have "lay members" or even "parishes" -- they have chapels and "people who come to mass here."
If they were to start appointing metropolitan bishops and naming a patriarch, both their self-understanding and the way in which mainstream Catholic doctrine sees them would change dramatically. The Old Catholic Churches are considered to be "Churches," though the woman-bishop thing is a problem. I should also note that the Polish National Catholic Church in the US, formed because of some ethnic tensions between Polish Catholics who felt excluded by other Catholic ethnicities -- the cardinals' desire to elect the Polish Wojtyła as Pope to connect with Polish Catholics didn't come from nowhere -- is considered a Church as well, and they also have a problem with the Old Catholics' woman thing.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
19d ago
That is a pretty major level of chutzpah. Have they considered getting angry about the filioque or nailing some theses about Vatican II to a church door?
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
19d ago
Well, the old school way in which both sides of the east-west schism saw each other was very much, "we are the Church, those schismatics are Not!The!Church."
Things have gotten more relaxed, especially on the Catholic side, but the formal view of Catholicism is "Catholicism is the True Church and the Orthodox should be in communion with us" and the formal view of Orthodoxy, which is much more muddled, is fairly close in most circles to "The Pope is a heretic and a schismatic who altered the creed that Must Not Be Altered and we are the True Church which holds to the true doctrine of the ecumenical councils."
I could sort of guess at a logic for penance, although I have zero confidence that I could predict Rome’s reasoning. But the rules for the validity of sacramental marriage have never made much sense to me. Rome recognizes the marriage of two baptized Protestants as sacramental, right? So why do the extra rules for Catholics affect the validity of the marriage instead of just its lawfulness?
The reasoning is that the function of penance, in addition to being a sacrament of God's forgiveness, is also about re-uniting someone who's 'excommunicated' from the Church, which mortal sin brings about, into communion. Committing a sin (except one of the really bad ones) isn't an "excommunication" in the legal sense, but it does mean that taking communion without absolution would be another mortal sin. The point is that a priest who's schismatic or cannot licitly confect the Eucharist (which is a statement of unity with the Church as well as with God) cannot admit people to the table that he can't legally prepare. The legal term is "faculty," which is something that the Pope delegates through the hierarchy. The view is that giving absolution to people is an act of "binding and loosing" delegated by Christ to Peter first and then to the other apostles, along with the keys to the kingdom of heaven, and therefore that the Pope as the successor of Peter is the ultimate arbiter of sins being forgiven.
Of course, I should be clear that while penance is the main way in which Catholicism promises to re-unite sinners with God, it's not necessarily the only way (just the only way in which it can be done formally in order to admit people to communion). If you confess your sins accurately to a priest and do your penance, God promises forgiveness, even if you're not sure how bad you feel about your sins or if your only reason is that you're afraid of the possibility of Hell or you just don't want to be seen by Betty from the parish council asking for a blessing from Father instead of taking communion. God meets people at whatever motive gets them into the confessional.
However, my understanding is that canon law says that even a schismatic priest can provide absolution if someone is dying, because the principle of giving people an avenue for sacramental forgiveness before God is more important in that case than Church law. But someone in danger of death, if there's no priest available, can also make an "act of perfect contrition", which is essentially a personal prayer of repentence for your sins based on love for God in his goodness, and not any self-interested reason, which is obviously a high bar.
I think you could say a lot of the Protestant sinner's prayers are essentially a means of aiming to state perfect contrition -- "Lord, I admit I am a sinner. I need and want Your forgiveness. Your mercy and grace is a gift You offer to me because of Your great love, not based on anything I have done," which is a segment of a sinner's prayer I found in 5 minutes on Google, is not too shabby as a statement of perfect contrition, especially because it talks about the love of God as the ultimate source of divine grace. Ultimately Catholicism doesn't make judgments about who's contrition is perfect and whose is self-interested, because parish priest #3462 can't read minds, so the confessional procedure is the way in which it promises people can both receive God's forgiveness and be re-admitted to the table.
In terms of marriage, the point is that going to a Catholic priest who's not in communion to validate your marriage as a Catholic is an explicit step of having a marriage outside the Catholic Church. Catholics who have Protestant or "we got married in Vegas" weddings also fall under that. Protestants and non-Christians aren't held to the same standard, because they aren't Catholic. Catholics are required to marry under the requirements of canon law, like how a state can declare an unlicensed marriage void because they set the law. Protestants aren't bound because they were never subject to the canon law in the first place; California can't declare your marriage invalid because you got married in Vegas.
Well, no one's been the Republican nominee since Romney other than Trump, who has a unique gravitational pull over the Republican party but is deeply divisive. He also won more than a few moderates in 2024 -- enough to swing the election in some key constituencies.
I would also note that the Obama attack energy against Romney can be attributed to the way Republicans reacted to Obama's first term -- if anyone in politics has been demonized unfairly, it's Barack Obama. I disagreed with him on things, but Republicans treated him like the coming of the antichrist. Both McCain and Obama ran remarkably clean campaigns, although I think McCain would have made a better president. (Far better than Romney, as well.)
I think the real thing here is not that the GOP doesn't want to seek moderate votes, but that Trump uniquely energizes both his supporters and his enemies. I think it'll be good for American politics that he's a term-limited old man who won't be with us for all that much longer (natural causes, of course -- he's 80), because he has too much of a gravity well for his actual competence at governing to justify.
urquan
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21d ago
I believe she's sincere. 2rafa's view generally is very strongly opposed to immigration and she's even made commentary in the past about how Catholic and German immigration into the United States fundamentally changed the nature of the country. I also believe she lives in the UK (London?) now because she believes the US is a lost cause due to immigration.
I admit it's very interesting for a Jewish lady to have such a strong attachment to Anglo-Saxons (of course if we go too deep on this we'll get down our own "migration into the country fundamentally changed the nature of society" story) that she'd go to bat for them against the Germans or the Italians, but nevertheless hers is a unique stance and I find it interesting even when I think she's wrong.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
21d ago
I’m sure hereandgone will enjoy Father’s homily this weekend about how the Irish tricolor is cringe and non-Christian, and the Irish really should stop trying to preserve Irish Gaelic because heritage and language are not worth propagating. Leave the culture to the religious orders and the priests, please.
As we all know, Catholic cultures are completely apologetic and nonplussed about their heritage, culture, and language.
This is sarcastic, for the mods’ sake. But your position is very silly.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
21d ago
Given her record since joining the Court I'm actually shocked that she was shortlisted.
But Thomas was put on the court to swap Thurgood Marshall for another black man, and he's based as all hell.
I’m with CertainlyWorse here — is this a mandatory program you have to send your children to for public education, or is this like a preschool with public subsidy or something?
I was in preschool before kindergarten, it was a white house run by a religious group. We played with blocks and there was naptime. No one did a welfare check on my parents’ house. Or if they did, my parents never mentioned it.
Edit: I looked it up, I guess this is a Head Start thing, and it’s mandatory for receiving the funding. It’s true that in America a teacher coming to your house is considered impolite, but the other thing about America is that surveillance of welfare recipients is normalized. There’s no “manager” who can override the home visit requirements. The Head Start program absolutely insists on it.
All the nonsense, as CertainlyWorse puts it, is obviously a welfare check figleaf, it’s transparently so. This isn’t a “black culture” difference thing, unless you count “being a recipient of federal social program funding” as a part of black culture.
What this particular thing sounds like is you’re accepting subsidized pre-K, which is oriented towards low-income families and designed to get children who might not make it to school at all to attend.
You don’t have to explain your financial situation, and I don’t judge anyone for taking advantage of resources in place. But I guess I’m a little surprised that you’re putting your kids in a program that my immediate mental association with, even before looking it up, was poor families while balking at the hoops that US welfare programs put poor families through, which suggests an unfamiliarity with the welfare system that Head Start hews close to. Is choosing a private program for pre-K not an option for you?
Edit 2: Is this actually a private pre-K after all? I’ve read some more and it’s possible that the pre-K you’re applying to also takes money from Head Start, and for reasons that I can presume rhyme with “equity” and “we did research on poor families and it helped”, some pre-Ks apply the same home visit rules to private pay families as to ones receiving the subsidy. That would explain the faintly ridiculous situation. But I don’t know that they’re going to bend it for you, even if that is the case.
It might be worthwhile to find another program, but I know childcare is scarce.
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