BreakerofHorsesandMen
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User ID: 3614
BreakerofHorsesandMen
4d ago
Okay, I can’t speak to liberal university college students, not having gone to college, but that wasn’t the original assertion.
I can tell you anecdotally, n=1, that while “Normal Christians” in flyover country won’t know the jargon, they are definitely aware that people are out there, both on the coasts and in flyover country, trying a new spin on justifying sexual sin.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
4d ago
You keep making these assertions, and I am willing to tentatively grant that Aella specifically maybe isn’t on the radar of “Normal Christians,” but hearing about polyamory is unavoidable, even out here in deep flyover country.
Do “Normal Christians” have more than a surface-level awareness of the concept and a desire to grant debating the concept any more time than “That’s just fornication with extra steps?” Probably not, but I would anecdotally state that they do know it is a thing.
This is going to be, quite-possibly, a below-illiterate tech question, so please bear with me and save all openly expressed disdain for the end.
I run a small business that makes about $20K a year, as a side hustle. I started soon after AI hit the mainstream and have found the $20 a month tier of ChatGPT to be invaluable for streamlining administrivia type tasks such as boilerplate emails, plus helpful for very early brainstorming and having a minimally effective sales pitch in 15 minutes. I still do some amount of cleaning up for these processes, less for the boilerplate things, more for the creative things. I have trained a couple of GPT’s to be focused on the specific tasks I need them for, and will continue to do so as/if I expand.
My question is, am I missing out on some capability by only using the basic bitch version of GPT? Could I be getting more bang for my buck, better sales emails, better crafted first pass sales pitches, more automation, etc, by changing products? Should I use a different LLM company, or pay for API access, or buy a good GPU and train my own sandslave, or what? Or am I fine where I’m at?
BreakerofHorsesandMen
4d ago
Some of the prose in On the Marble Cliffs was mind-blowing.
Maybe I’m an illiterate savage or whatever, but I think especially of the lines towards the beginning, describing the snakes in the garden, and it’s just perfect visual imagery.
He really is a wildly underrated writer, almost certainly because he wasn’t the right sort for mid and late 20th century literary circles, and I’m glad he’s seeing a Renaissance.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
4d ago
Which is unfortunate and significantly part of modernist Catholicism’s problem with total incoherency.
Catholics can all agree that the specific rules of the Old Testament law have been superseded, while understanding that God instituted just laws and punishments for the Israelites. So it becomes very awkward to say that “the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person,” when the everlasting God both was and is implementing death penalties.
I don’t buy sedevacantism or the idea that Francis and other modern popes have been heretics (although Francis probably skated closest to the line), but I do generally treat them like John XII or Alexander VI. Sometimes there are good Popes, sometimes you get a string of bad Popes and in the fullness of time, the damage they cause to the Church will be restored.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
4d ago
At least people are finally catching on to the ultimate “Always has been.”
When I am Weaker Than You, I ask You for Freedom because that is according to Your Principles; when I am Stronger than You, I take away Your Freedom because that is according to My Principles.
From the outside, the purpose of the modern legal profession (but especially of legal “thinkers”) appears to be ignoring simple, boring, innocuous truths.
To use the example of the Fifth Amendment, America operated for 177 years without Miranda rights, and this was not considered a Fifth Amendment violation. This implies, to me, a simple, boring truth that our Fifth Amendment jurisprudence is unnecessarily overcomplicated.
Your Fourth Amendment concerns are probably suffering from being somewhere in the same ballpark. Forced on you by overcomplicated jurisprudence.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
5d ago
Best I can do you is to say that I don’t live in Silicon Valley.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
5d ago
Speaking just to the specific question of how one understand’s Christian love, I tend to take Brand’s stance on it.
What the world calls by that name “Love”,
I know not and I reck not of.
God’s love I recognise alone,
Which melts not at the piteous plaint,
Which is not moved by dying groan,
And its caress is chastisement.
What answer’d through the olive-trees
God, when the Son in anguish lay,
Praying, “O take this cup away!”
Did He then take it? Nay, child, nay:
He made him drink it to the lees.
Never did word so sorely prove
The smirch of lies, as this word Love:
With devilish craft, where will is frail,
Men lay Love over, as a veil,
And cunningly conceal thereby
That all their life is coquetry.
Whose path’s the steep and perilous slope,
Let him but love,—and he may shirk it;
If he prefer Sin’s easy circuit,
Let him but love,—he still may hope;
If God he seeks, but fears the fray,
Let him but love,—’tis straight his prey;
If with wide-open eyes he err,
Let him but love,—there’s safety there!
God’s love is infinitely more than our human conception of love, and it is bundled up together with his righteousness and wrath and holiness. The same God who says “Love one another as I have loved thee,” is perfectly, rightly capable of wiping out peoples and places. Failure to grasp this is how you wind up with “Love wins” and “Hate has no home here” churches that would never tell anyone they are living in specific sin. But it is clear from Scripture that whatever else God is, he is not what is conceived of in the modern understanding of “God is love.”
I hate, I despise your religious festivals; your assemblies are a stench to me. Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them. Amos 5:21-22
I make the argument that when Christianity, taken as a whole, was most adherent to God’s commands and intentions, is also the time it was riding high in the world in terms of temporal power. It was the time when it had made itself strong enough to resist outside conquest and to, from that base of operations, eventually evangelize the world, however imperfectly. At that time it was confident in itself, assertive, and had not yet fully fallen under the sway of the “The only thing that matters is love” heresy.
Similarly, the interpretation of agape gives the pre-arranged conclusion away from the beginning. Agape isn’t just for comrades in the cause, it is meant, in varying degrees, for everyone.
In theory, I should have agape for Slavoj Zizek, just like I should for a fellow parishioner. It has nothing to do with comrades in the Communist or cause-oriented sense and I would argue demonstrates Zizek’s extremely weak understanding of or an intentional misrepresentation of the concept in order to bolster an otherwise weak argument.
There is also an additional element, not generally mentioned because it really is too horrible for the average American, based or not, to want to speak out loud.
That total loss and pyrrhic victory were achieved in an environment where the soldiers involved could be confident that their homes and families were safely defended an ocean away.
Everyone will wake up into a whole different world the night that some American guerrillas hike into the mountains above a base and start dropping mortar rounds into base housing.
No American, government or otherwise, is prepared for that kind of war.
Edit: To avoid potential accusations of fedposting, Almighty God forbid this kind of war come to my beloved country.
This is not political commentary it's lashing out. He's still framing the nazis as villains.
A fair take, and entirely plausible given that it’s Kanye we’re talking about.
But, I think there is an alternative possible interpretation. Identifying with the villain doesn’t necessarily, in our modern age, indicate that the speaker thinks they are wrong or even the evil guy. It is entirely possible that Kanye both understands Hitler as the pre-assigned villain of the modern religion, and not only identifies with him but in some fashion views him as having done good things, or been on the right path, or something like that.
It’s sort of like how Joshua is viewed as a Biblical hero by Christians and Jews, but did quite a lot of total genocide in Canaan, of the sort that makes him very much a proto-Hitler if assessed by the dominant morality of our age. Villain to some, but an indicator to others that the dominant morality is actually wrong about quite a lot of things.
Kanye could be viewing Hitler in something like the same sort of framing.
Edit: I just realized Taylor released a song a while back about being the villain. I think there is an incipient cultural trend of “Maybe I’m the bad guy, but I’m right and I’m going to embrace it” occurring. Which is the first step on the road to the villain eventually being reinterpreted as the hero.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
8d ago
Reading this immediately after reading the discussion of Dom Toretto’s Charger in Tinker Tuesday was trippy.
I had very important questions about the Reunification Wars of the Fast and Furious universe.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
8d ago
I will do my best to lay out my thoughts on the topic:
Speed Read: Arguments that immigrant labor accepting lower wages and benefits makes costs lower are strictly first-order evaluations that neglect both actual second and third-order costs, as well as the native populations perceived costs. I consider those perceptions to be a valuable signal to decision-makers that the economic data they are using to justify their decisions is in someway misaligned, or more likely, completely cooked.
There are a couple of reasons for my assertion. First, a tremendous portion of healthcare costs are known to be a result of senior care costs; Western governments in general, especially the UK, fund these costs via taxation and massive debt spending, which is inflationary. Senior care is a low status job, as is every job that used to be primarily sourced internally from within the family. Therefore, a proportion of the workforce engaged in senior care has been brought in from outside in order to provide this care. This workforce does not perform as well at taking care of the local population’s elderly, because they lack kin-based or even ethnic motivations to care for them, and also because they are doing it just as a job. The government has to attempt in some fashion to maintain quality of care as the workforce degrades, so it implements a typical state strategy, which is to create massive amounts of bureaucracy in an attempt to replace internal motivation with checklists, paperwork, and agencies. Because this is a long-term losing battle, the quality of care continues to degrade, but because bureaucracies are almost impossible to destroy, the money continues to flow in increasing amounts over time. Lower quality of care, greater cost for less output.
I will tangent here to say that the total size of the proportion of non-native British workers in the healthcare workforce is impossibly muddied by very foolish (or malicious) bureaucratic decisions to declare as “British” all sorts of people who are not native British. And this matters very much in terms of both cultural and economic costs. My people have been in the Lower 48 for going on 300 years, and yet we will never, ever be “Native Americans” from the perspective of actual Native Americans. I am perfectly fine with this, but I use it as an example of how two ethnes can maintain de facto boundary lines for hundreds of years, even in the face of significant forced government assimilation attempts. Just because non-British nationals make up 12% of the healthcare workforce, doesn’t mean that the native British ethne makes up 88% of the healthcare workforce. I would wager it is actually much lower than that and that this has significant cultural damage effects that contribute to raised costs, because the ethnes are different and in low-grade conflict with each other, despite an attempt to deny this by calling them all “British.”
Second, mass immigration of any kind appears to drive down the fertility rates and reduce the status of the original population. We can see this in conquests, colonizations, and, uh…the non-colonization mass immigration occurring for the past 50-60 years across the West. When fertility rates are low, the elderly have, tautologically, fewer children and grandchildren willing to share the burden of caring for their elderly relatives. That means that if care is going to be provided at all, it has to be provided by the healthcare industry/bureaucracy. This also increases costs, as you have to pay someone to do something that children and grandchildren might otherwise have been willing to do for free. It also increases costs because, if children and grandchildren are the ones actually providing the labor, they would likely be more inclined to let their elderly relatives die earlier (potentially leading to Nights of the Pillow, but I mean this mostly in a gentler sense). That is, it is easy to demand heroic and eye-poppingly expensive interventions that are in no one’s interest when it’s government doctors doing the work. It’s easy to make huge demands in spending when it is someone else’s money and time. Much harder to demand that when you actually see and deal with Grandma’s condition every day.
Finally, I also think that perception matters. Yes, as people point out, it is true that in the 50’s, houses were smaller and everyone only had one car, but the dominant ethne was confident and happy and this results in a productive and happy population, which tends to drive down not just actual costs, but perceived costs as well. If I have to pay $20 more for an appointment with a doctor who is visibly and understandably of my culture and people, that might be worth a lot more in knock-on cost effects overall than is immediately apparent from arguments of “it costs more!” Maybe I see the doctor less because I feel better helped at the first appointment, driving down costs by removing that appointment from healthcare expenses altogether. I’ve been using senior care as the most salient example and probably lowest hanging fruit, but I think that there is a good reason to believe that a hypothetical NHS of 2050, staffed nearly entirely with native British, serving a population of nearly entirely native British and prioritizing attention to that population over attention to non-native concerns, would be overall cheaper than the 2050 equivalent of current NHS.
This is my NHS specific argument.
This is a total tangent, but additionally, I also think that modern style immigration is very much the camel’s nose. Once you let in a genius Indian doctor, no matter how great a guy that dude is, the inevitable slide is towards more and more costs as a result of letting in more and more unqualified immigrants for any of a variety of reasons. This is why my argument surrounding immigration is that the government, as such, should have no significant control over it except for the following two rules.
- The only acceptable way to immigrate is to be married to a current citizen.
- Citizen to immigrant marriages are not able to be legally dissolved in any way.
I think this far, far better reflects the slow churning of peoples at the edges of territory that has occurred across all of human history, and keeps the ethne from stagnating without creating all the sturm und drang of post-60’s mass immigration ideology.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
8d ago
One could argue that the expected role of the woman has changed, and now they are all out of the house doing labor (and “labor”) elsewhere. This is frequently to the detriment of their drastically reduced number of children, because young children really do need a mother around most of the time.
I’ve never met a daycare provider or a maid who is even half as good as a half-decent stay-at-home mom. And there are many decent stay-at-home moms out there, women who love their homes and their kids. They just don’t get noticed because of mal-oriented societal norms, and because they aren’t and never can be influencers, and because they understand that they don’t have to become like men or compete with men to be more precious than rubies.
The existence of organisations like NICE in the UK also tacitly accepts this fact.
It will never cease amusing me that in 1945, C.S. Lewis, one of England’s most successful authors, named an organization of scientific depravity “N.I.C.E.,” and then 54 years later, England just goes ahead and creates something of a very similar nature, with the same name and everything.
Who could have realized Torment Nexus jokes were already stale before the turn of the millennium.
They could support more people if the government hadn't underfunded the NHS!
British people are already taxed up to their eyeballs, and the NHS is better funded and staffed than ever. In 2018 it already made up 30% of all of England’s services spending, so I’m not sure from where you’re going to get more funding. Despite all that the A&E’s are, morning noon and night, hugely overcrowded every time I’ve been in one, full of very un-British looking people, horribly slow and incapable of triage. There’s only so much blood left in the British stone and it can’t fix those problems.
The actual alternative for Brits is to kick out their unproductive, non-British population, tighten their belts, and spend a decade or two training up new doctors and nurses from the natives. That would drive down costs and reduce wait times in the long run, but no one in a democracy is ever willing to suffer short term unpleasantness, so the NHS will just keep being a money pit until Britain cracks up. It might also help to cut the bureaucracy that infests all Western service providers. I am willing to give credit where even minimal credit is due and it looks like Starmer is willing to do that so maybe there will be some gains from that which stave off disaster for a while.
Alternatively, they could privatize it, which would at least let the companies involved ration care more sensibly.
Let me know how that works out for you.
24 When Israel had finished killing all the men of Ai in the fields and in the wilderness where they had chased them, and when every one of them had been put to the sword, all the Israelites returned to Ai and killed those who were in it. 25 Twelve thousand men and women fell that day—all the people of Ai. 26 For Joshua did not draw back the hand that held out his javelin until he had destroyed[a] all who lived in Ai. 27 But Israel did carry off for themselves the livestock and plunder of this city, as the Lord had instructed Joshua.
Hard-heartedness works out surprisingly well for God’s people, sometimes, as it turns out.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
11d ago
It’s crazy to think that there was a time when the Onion was genuinely funny.
The lone and level sands stretch far away, I guess.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
12d ago
One avoids being a creep or a fornicator or a player, on the other hand, through passive virtues: not doing anything bad, resisting temptation, not saying the wrong thing.
The problem being that the passive virtues are maximized by never doing anything. One can never rape if one never has sex. One can never say the wrong thing if one never talks. One can never hurt anyone if one never moves.
I recall reading somewhere that one should compare one's aspirations against a corpse, and if the corpse would be good at what you're aspiring for, you should reject those aspirations and find new ones, because your aspirations are anti-life. This is the problem here: the evangelical teenage boy has been taught chastity is a virtue, but chastity is a virtue best practiced by the dead, and the Good Christian Boy who never causes trouble with girls is often revealed to be homosexual or to lack healthy desire altogether.
I’m reminded of a saying from Sir William Marshal as he was on his deathbed.
The context is that William has had an extremely successful career beating other knights in tournament, and at the time the earned reward for that was taking the loser’s equipment. The church argued that this was an unlawful taking and William had to make amends for it for the good of his soul.
The Marshal replied: ‘Bear with me a moment, Henry. The clerics are too hard on us! They shave us too close! I’ve captured five hundred knights and kept their arms, their destriers and all their gear. If that means the kingdom of God is barred to me then that’s that – I can’t give them back! I can do no more for God, I’d say, than yield myself to Him repentant of all my misdeeds, of all the wrongs I’ve done. Unless the clergy mean to see me damned they should stop their harrying! Either their claims are false or no man can have salvation!’”
We live in an age when the priests have accrued too much power, no one has the capacity yet to tell them to get wrecked, and it will keep leading to passivity until the fever breaks.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
12d ago
Before I respond in any kind of more substantive way, I will throw out there that I don’t think we’re really at crossed wires.
Polygamy is illegal in the United States. My take is that relationships that would be polygamous under a different legal regime just retitle themselves as polyamorous and go without the official legal imprimatur of marriage despite being long-term mutual households, and being essentially patriarchal “one dude, multiple women” setups. That’s what I mean about them being polygamy on the euphemism treadmill. It’s just patriarchal (which is good, IMO!) dynamics accruing to themselves some woke cover. It’s all very fascinating to me, honestly.
To me, harem-type setups have something distinctly different about them, in essence, compared to the types you mention above.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
12d ago
Aquinas views sexual pleasure in marriage as necessary, natural and good. Going to the sex act with one’s spouse strictly for the pleasure is a sin, but sexual pleasure within marriage and the marital act is a positive.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
12d ago
I just finished Ancient Law by Henry Sumner Maine, and am about to break into The Ancient City by de Coulanges.
I also finished Blood Meridian last week. I had taken kind of a long break before the final few chapters, so I wound up reading the whole thing again and finishing it.
Ancient Law was very interesting, taking it both as a piece of its time, and considering that the publisher I bought it from is openly reactionary. It was very much a book that I could see being easily read as a leftist piece, given that the author is quite happy to laud the perceived moral development of his then-Victorian society, and appears to be under the impression that the Kingdom of God on Earth will just keep getting closer and closer.
Maybe I’ll do a review of it at some point.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
12d ago
This is so fascinating!
I would not call a one penis policy monogamy. But it’s also not polyamory, at least not as I understand the essence of the concept. It’s just regular old polygamy on the euphemism treadmill.
That’s why it’s so interesting that you have reason to believe it’s the most common format. On the rare occasions I run into openly polyamorous relationships, they are almost always one woman/two or more men. It’s hard to phrase the apparent dynamics charitably because they have been pretty clearly moderately attractive woman+beta wallet cuck+jobless alpha chad. If it’s not that kind of relationship, then it’s sloppy low-class, low-status trailer park relationships being dressed up as a “polycule.”
Inasmuch as I think of those latter two types as being something distinct enough from polygamy to have their own technical term, I think one penis policies are just something very old coming out, inevitably, but having to dress itself in modern clothing, as it were, even if the clothes don’t fit well or at all.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
12d ago
On the topic of dancing, I think a portion of the problem is that this guy’s church comes from an American Protestant religious conservative background, and that grouping of people has, at best, an ambivalent relationship with dancing.
The kids aren’t going to feel comfortable dancing if they aren’t taught, as you point out, and then courting rituals have to be emphasized and valued, rather than somewhat grudgingly put up with.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
12d ago
Apropos of a very small, tangential discussion on the main culture war thread, what are the borders of polyamory?
For me personally, I don’t think of any variation of one man/x number of women as actually being polyamorous in the current year sense. It’s all just gradations between patriarch with +1 wife, or a mistresses situation, or a full on Ottoman seraglio.
I can’t say I base this on much more than vibes, but modern polyamory seems to connote at least one additional male in the mix, and probably something that tends towards more even mixes of men and women.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
12d ago
Does he lean in hard on the poly-am thing?
Every time I run into one of his tweets or a tweet from his marketing wife, it distinctly sounds like a harem. Is there reason to think there is another guy in the mix?
It reads like ChatGPT, very much so.
You will catch trolls, idiots, and other bots. If that’s your target, you’re spot-on.
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