Eupraxia
Shut up and quantify
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User ID: 3132
Since when did population ratios matter? They certainly didn't matter to the British Raj or to the conquistadors. Sure, the power gap between whites and everyone else is smaller than it was in 1870, or even 1492, but most of the other ~7.2 billion people on Earth simply can't constitute a real existential threat to whites, you don't even need HBD to justify it. Even wrt China, they're a unproven upstart that lacks the proven track record of Europeans in global dominance.
seeing only one kind of racial solidarity as unacceptable is A) illiberal and B) corrosive to multicultural societies.
I offer an explanation, not an excuse. As for multicultural societies, their myriad weaknesses have already been extensively detailed, what's one more?
Eupraxia
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10hr ago
The disconnect is that you conflate sexual intercourse (i.e. PIV) with "firing the gun", when under your metaphor PIV would be shooting to kill (fulfilling the act's primary purpose) and non-procreative sex would be target practice (fulfilling a secondary, recreational purpose).
Eupraxia
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20hr ago
I can't speak for him, but I think that in general the particular aversion to white solidarity comes from the understanding that ingroup preference necessarily induces outgroup hostility; it is impossible to love your neighbor without (at least somewhat) hating the outsider. Considering that whites are by far the most dangerous race on earth, with a proven track record of BTFOing everyone else, it's completely reasonable for white solidarity to be seen as more of a threat than other races' ingroup preferences; if you lived next door to an 800-pound gorilla, you wouldn't want to give it any ideas about how hungry he is and how tasty you look.
Eupraxia
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3d ago
You might want to remove the part of that link after ”?igsh=”, because it’s showing me your insta account.
Eupraxia
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4d ago
things are just simpler when you're inherently on the same page
I'll note that this doesn't seem to be symmetrical; there's no real male counterpart to the tomboy archetype. AFAICT, women don't fantasize about doing their nails and gossiping with their BF(F)s, or at least there's not nearly as many of them as guys who fantasize about playing videogames and shittalking with their GFs.
The chauvinistic side of me wants to say that it's because girl stuff is just objectively lame, or at least less cool than guy stuff. I think that's half-right, but I feel there's still something missing.
Seconding @thrownaway24e89172's response below. I see this kind of disclaimer for HBD-based arguments all the time (e.g. "there are no inferior or superior races, but...") even though the conclusion they dismiss is usually an obvious extrapolation from the forwarded premises. You might justify the "unequal but equal" mindset by pointing to the special role of women in childbearing, but nevertheless men are still universally regarded as the primary sex, with woman defined in relation to him; Eve was made of Adam, after all. I hate that it's the case and wish it weren't so, but women are definitely seen as intrinsically lesser (in the "great chain of being" sense) compared to men.
With that said, what's your justification for the equal worth/dignity of the sexes despite their unequal ability?
Sorry for the late response, I've drafted this far more times than I really should have.
I've completely changed most aspects of my life, in many cases entirely reversing my previous preferences or habits.
You would consider you new preferences and habits to be unambiguously superior to before, yes? If so, where is the aforementioned trade-off?
To put it another way, a true believer in the Greek Pantheon is obliged to offer libations and sacrifices to the gods to remain pious. From a secular perspective, this serves zero purpose and is an active waste of valuable resources. In your worship, what do you sacrifice for your faith?
If we return to Deus Vult and the sword, will that satisfy you in some way?
It would, yes. If the word of Christ really is the Way and the Truth and the Light, Christians ought to be far less complacent in their efforts to spread the gospel than they currently are. Should you not rout the disbelievers, those who lead souls astray with false idols and apathetic impiety? Should you not hate the heretics, those who twist revelation into abomination? Your predecessors certainly did, so what changed?
there are also a lot of Christians like myself who are not partaking of "modern" Christianity but rather the old sort, and for whom it is an actual way of life.
I think the Christianity you practice is actually quite different to the old sort, at least in practical implementation. For one, the demons of the earth who possessed the insane, swapped babies with changelings, communed with witches, and who many good Christians thought actually, literally existed have seemingly vanished. I can only assume that amulet technology and exorcism procedures have seen massive improvements in the last couple of centuries.
I don't mean to say that you're obligated to believe in witches and demons, or that you're a hypocrite for not. But I have a hunch that the sort of casual superstition that past Christians practiced may have been vital (or at least a factor) in avoiding the exact sort of secularization that modernity hath wrought, at least among the common folk. Us gentry might be able to satisfy ourselves with philosophies of the Good, but many don't see the point of belief when there's nothing concrete in it for them.
We haven't seen an impassioned and unambiguous attempt at genocide by a first world country since the Holocaust. Israel's actions, as genocidal as they may or may not be, simply don't compare to the total national annihilation that I think you're envisioning.
Despite your fantasies, I don't think you are actually Holden Bloodfeast incarnate. It's easy to say that you want all your enemies (who consist of an entire ethnic group) to die in nuclear hellfire on the internet, but I'm confident you aren't actually sociopathic enough to push the button and witness the results yourself. In any case, nobody really wants the game-theoretic consequences of real genocide being back on the table. I certainly don't, as I'm not exactly lily white myself and I'd prefer p(TND) or even p(Liberia) to stay as low as possible.
Eupraxia
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16d ago
This is all well and good, but what stake do you put in your non-materialistic beliefs? How much does the Word of God guiding you trade off against anything an agnostic in your position would do?
I don't want to be a Redditor about it, but I don't see the point of modern Christianity. Coming from a largely apatheistic perspective, it's trivially obvious that the actual importance with which people generally and Christians especially treat religion is at an all-time low. Christians have gone from waging holy war against the heathens to missionary expeditions seeking conversions to "interfaith dialogue", from hanging homosexuals and other sinners to socially ostracizing them them to... IDK, frowning concernedly? From a historical perspective, nearly all Westerners are thoroughly unserious in their practice of religion. If the faithful don't take themselves seriously, why should I?
Eupraxia
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17d ago
Considering that a common point from apologetics is that Christians tend to have healthier communities and better lives than their atheistic peers, that seems pretty categorically false.
Eupraxia
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25d ago
…Where are you getting your numbers from? I simply cannot believe that support for criminalization of homosexuality approaches 1 in 5, let alone support for construction crane conversion therapy. By my observation, the anti-LGBT crowd generally don’t desire to go on the offensive, they just want to be left alone.
Eupraxia
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1mo ago
Women have much much less agency than men
If you were to give a rationalist-style quantifiable estimate of the agency gap between men and women, what numbers would you give for the SD gap, overlap percentage, and percent of women at or above the male average? I agree with you directionally, but I think that the actual biological difference is closer to the gender IQ gap than the strength gap, and in any case I believe that agency and general virtus is a nearly unalloyed good and should be more prevalent among the fairer sex.
Great for you, legitimately. It sounds like you have a good thing going for both of you, and I don't mean to denigrate your particular situation, whatever it may be. I was more trying to use your framing to make a broader point.
the women in our parish do not care in the slightest what mainstream culture considers low-status
Mainstream culture has nothing to do with the point I'm making here.
Some things are more or less valuable by their very nature, including labor roles. Hard work and simple living will always have its place, but the moneychangers will have theirs too, and they'll always be more individually valuable and materially better off than the salt of the earth types. When status corresponds with practical value (as it has to greater or lesser degrees in every society on Earth), more valuable work = more status.
I posit that modern housewives are less essential to the functioning of the household than they've ever been, and that this reduction in utility has resulted in a concomitant reduction in status. Women's work has been declining in utility ever since the transition to agriculture, but the trend became turbocharged with the Industrial Revolution; it's no coincidence that feminism began in earnest in the mid-1800s. This status reduction can be moderated with religiosity (as in your case), but not negated. This is why we cannot simply "RETVRN" — not without adaptation, anyways. I have my own ideas about how to manage this on a societal scale, but I'm glad that you've made it work for you.
Eupraxia
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1mo ago
I meant the stay-at-home dad comment to mean more that men don't seem to be particularly unsuited to housekeeping, certainly not to a similar extent that (trads say) women are unsuited for work outside the home.
But plenty of higher status people would suck doing lower status work. It is complementary but unequal.
I'm still not convinced that their roles are really complementary, and my impression is that it used to be less unequal. When everyone's a farmer/hunter-gatherer, the relative complexity of work within and outside the home is far closer than when your society is built on white-collar work.
Eupraxia
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1mo ago
That's true, a lot of archaic household tasks require true skill and specialization such that they're legitimately complimentary to men's work; I don't mean to diss actual traditional housekeeping. The problem is that we're living in the 21st century, and you can't meaningfully specialize into vacuuming and Crock-Pot operation.
Eupraxia
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1mo ago
Sure, it's possible that women have some temperamental lean towards homemaking, but I haven't seen any rigorous establishment of that premise. By my informal observation, you don't see a broad movement of stay-at-home dads complaining about having to be around their kids and do chores all day, and in any case the actual complexity of the work (and thus its associated status) is still low.
Is your wife's role in the family actually complimentary to you or simply a lower station? Because it seems to me like if you swapped positions, you could do her job perfectly well (minus the pregnancy bit), but she'd have no idea how to run your business.
I suppose that your relationship might be described as harmonious compared to alternatives, but you and other trad types have to own the fact that (edit: modern) homemaking is a low status occupation and that many women won't be happy with that.
Eupraxia
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1mo ago
As @quiet_NaN said below, agency (that is, the ability to be an independent agent) is not necessarily correlated with asociality (that is, the tendency to devalue/neglect the collective good). While there's a degree of social conformity that's required to maintain the commons, a dearth of distributed agency/agentic elite causes a society to follow the path of least resistance, usually to its detriment. Some(well, most) societies are built to require less distributed agency/more social conformity (e.g. East Asia), but they tend to be outcompeted by more individualistic but still commonwealth-respecting societies (e.g. the West).
Eupraxia
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1mo ago
Maybe not a virus, but a vaccine...
Eupraxia
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1mo ago
I can semi-concur with you here. I went to a French immersion school in a decently black area as a kid, and it was a far better school than its demographics would suggest. Most of the black kids were either immigrants from Francophone Africa or otherwise upper-middle class, and while it still wasn't private-school quality, it seemed a hell of a lot better than the surrounding public schools.
Eupraxia
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1mo ago
I suppose I have. I'm still fermenting this philosophy of mine, but I see it as a good sign that it's led me to solid ground.
More aspirationally, I envision a reworking and expansion of pink-collar work to span a wider gamut of expertise and prestige while remaining distinctly feminine. There still need to be secretaries and receptionists (or not, depending on how AI shapes up), but I'd prefer if more was expected of the average pink-collar worker in terms of embodied competence.
Whose definition of eudaemonia are we using here?
My own idiosyncratic definition, which rests on certain assumptions:
I take it as an axiom that eudaemonia comes from the exercise of virtues, and that virtues range on a scale from passive virtues to active virtues. Passive (feminine) virtues include chastity, temperance, mercy, and piety: they are something you avoid, or are. Active (masculine) virtues include valor, industry, courage, and nobility: they are something you do, or become.
I take it as further axiom that in general, the active virtues hold greater eudaemonic potential: they are what build monuments. Feminine virtues are absolutely important for individual and civilizational well-being, but they are the mortar and masculine virtues are the brick.
Therefore, the sex who is disinclined towards and incentivized against exercising masculine virtue will suffer lower average potential for human flourishing. Women's maximum capacity for masculine virtue is almost certainly lower that men's maximum capacity due to the consequences of gestation, but I believe that they are capable of more, should be incentivized to exercise what they have, and might hopefully be gifted with greater capacity for excellence.
tl;dr: genetically-modified tomboy supremacy
I'm not sure what you mean about agency in this context. That they should be more assertive?
Those typically-male traits which combine to create agency (internal locus of control, risk taking, a certain amount of disagreeableness) are what have led men to dominate public affairs since the beginning of civilization. The increasing complexity of civilization over time has in turn caused the expansion of the public sphere and atrophy of the private sphere. After thousands of years of this, 99% of everything that matters for the maintenance of civilization occurs in the male realm, and the instrumental value of femininity for civilization has been pared back to its bare biological function. You yourself have touched on something like what I'm getting at here.
Given this, it seems to me that to preserve the dignified utility of woman, her sphere should be expanded to include particular sections of the public domain. You'll notice that this is the stated goal of feminism; while I agree with the early feminists about the root of the problem and the directional solution, my preferred means and ends acknowledge intrinsic sex differences and attempt to work within them when possible and subtly modify them when required.
Also, I'm proposing an increase in the mentioned masculine traits, but not to the point of complete parity with men. There's definitely some amount of contextually beneficial tradeoff to conformity and risk aversion, I just think women's present average amounts aren't adaptive.
Eupraxia
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1mo ago
Women's importance to the continuance of the species is absolutely important, I agree. My concern is that on an individual level, it seems to me like women get the short end of the stick in their potential for eudaemonia, to the point where the Athenian prayer isn't unwarranted. See here downthread for my elaboration.
(I appreciate your enjoyment, thx!)
So you believe that the purpose of genitals is to engage in sexual intercourse, defined as PIV resulting in internal ejaculation, correct? Furthermore, you believe that using genitals for sexual acts outside of sexual intercourse is immoral or at least improper, yes?
Such a narrow understanding of telos seems... fragile. The way I see it, using one's genitals in a way that does not deposit semen intravaginally is less like using a gun as a table leg and more like using a flathead screwdriver as a pry: it's not the "primary" purpose of the object(s), but it's a valid alternate application that can be rewarding if used properly.
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