Hieronymus
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User ID: 419
Hieronymus
1d ago
... I would probably mostly be worrying about holding [the baby] wrong and injuring it or something.
This is a normal feeling, but once you hold a baby or two for a while you get past it fairly quickly.
Hieronymus
9d ago
I'm American, and I've known a lot of people with PTO that combines vacation and sick days. It may be a difference in state labor laws.
Hieronymus
9d ago
That's a good point, and I appreciate the perspective. My gut take on those laws as a blue-state conservative is more cynical and culture warry.
As an aside, my grandmother was a nurse in a delivery ward among other things. Local doctors sometimes played a role in adoptions then, and from her stories they could be pretty whim driven too, as well meaning as they were.
Hieronymus
10d ago
Do we know that compensation was the motive here? Based on the article it's possible that they were trying to give the child up to someone who could raise the baby better than they could and that the token compensation was just that. Obviously this would be an egregiously irresponsible way to do it, but that makes belief in one's unfitness for parenthood more understandable, not less.
I don't have any knowledge of the case, and this is all speculation. But I think it would explain the actions of everyone involved, prosecutors included, better than greed does.
Hieronymus
10d ago
Are you thinking of the PCA, which is confessional or evangelical, or the PCUSA, which is mainline?
Hieronymus
15d ago
That's funny. I was thinking about a time I traveled with a woman friend and we had separate beds in the same room. There was no hanky panky or intention of any, but our trip was made simpler and more pleasant because we didn't have to prove it to anyone. If either of us had been married we'd probably have made different arrangements for the spouse's comfort – but we weren't, so we won a bit of convenience from our liberal society.
Hieronymus
15d ago
IIRC wasn't Cyberpunk the first RPG to do the body type shtick?
Fair! I don’t know if it was first, but it was definitely early. I can’t believe I forgot that.
Hieronymus
16d ago
What’s your theory on how they sustained a high trust society given this kind of defection? Are these just small-community mores being applied to larger places that hadn’t yet come to terms with their size?
Hieronymus
16d ago
... because even "beloved classics" like Cyberpunk featured LGBT themes.
Okay, this is a nitpick.
There was the MtF bartender at the Afterlife with the street racing line of sidequests, and that did feel preachy. And there were the gay romance options. Did I miss anything else?
On the other hand, you have Fingers, the ripperdoc who has made himself androgynous and is unambiguously a villain, in a way clearly tied to his sexuality, in a major quest. I was pretty surprised they'd go there. I felt like they did a good job of preserving the setting's themes even when they were in tension with the mores of the current year.
Arguably the racial updates, making the setting less white, were more progressive. They were in line with the tech updates, though, splitting the difference between retro-future and future-future. So I have mixed feelings.
The way they handled religion was pretty bad in general, but I can only speculate as to motives there.
Hieronymus
21d ago
I’m not sure this is culture war, beyond the degree to which Emacs vs. vim is culture war. That said, Rust has never really appealed to me. It strikes me more as a B&D C++ alternative than a C alternative, and I was somewhat surprised when Linus decided to allow it. I think that there is room for a systems language with the spirit of C but fewer undefined behaviors and better ergonomics around things like array bounds and bit bashing, but I don’t think any of C’s would-be successors has quite found the niche yet.
More on topic, I think that @FistfullOfCrows’ observation about Rust’s leadership is apropos. I usually take a code of conduct in open source projects as a statement that this is a self-consciously progressive space and that even relatively tactful (for programmers) dissent is unacceptable. Consequently I assume that I am not wanted there; I may still use the software depending on what it does, but I am not likely to provide bug reports, patches, or donations.
How seriously I take that depends on context. In Python I think that Guido, while a progressive sort of guy, is a restraining force; but since he has resigned the role of benevolent dictator, things have gotten messier. The FreeBSD CoC generated enough backlash and reassurances that I still take its implications with a grain of salt. SQLite’s code of ethics, by contrast, countersignals the code of conduct trend quite strongly, and it even managed to get lots of positive comments on HackerNews doing so.
For Rust, though? It’s not lost on me that Rust used to be a Mozilla project, and everything I see suggests that the culture that pushed out Brendan Eich lives on there. They’re not hiding their power level.
Hieronymus
28d ago
As someone who's pro-suburb, I like places with human-scale mini-downtowns – usually just one street – with those kinds of thing, and I would heartily support linking them with one another, nearby towns, and the city with buses. But the nearby city gets to define our mass-transit policy, and they want jobs downtown with commuter links to hollowed out bedroom communities, so that's what our mass-transit policy supports. The suburbs that maintain their own characters do so in defiance of the city and of transit.
Hieronymus
1mo ago
I feel like we’re reading different Mottes. I don’t think it’s accurate to compare the rules here to any subreddit the admins have continued to tolerate, given that the limits of their tolerance are why we’re here and not there.
I have observed that posters are willing to do more consensus building and boundary policing on issues to do with literal wars than with culture wars, and the mods tend to tolerate it more, which is unfortunate. But even that fades after a while, and discussion opens up again as it never seems to do on reddit.
Hieronymus
1mo ago
Why must the male be the one that takes on responsibility/authority?
In the context of a parachurch ministry, the answer is straightforward: God designed the human sexes that way, and He has commanded us to follow that design. The Bible is pretty emphatic about this:
- Genesis 2:18-25 begins, “Then the Lord God said, ‘It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.’”
- 1 Corinthians 11:3 says, “But I want you to understand that the head of every man is Christ, the head of a wife is her husband, and the head of Christ is God.” I do not want to put too much weight on the nuances of this one, because it comes in a discussion about headcoverings that is much disputed and kind of confusing in the context of the rest of the Bible. But I don’t want to leave it out.
- Ephesians 5:22-33 is the passage that is most often referenced in evangelical churches on this topic. If you want to understand what the Promise Keepers aspired to, it’s the one to read.
- Colossians 3:18-22 is a condensed household code in line with the other passages.
- 1 Peter 3:1-7 commands wives to give obedience and husbands to give understanding and honor, along with some thoughts on feminine virtue.
If I were to make a secular argument, I would build it on the distribution of temperaments in men and women and how they interact within this framework, and I’d refer to studies of different subcultures with different marriage norms, being aware of the biases in social psychology. But it’s much harder to make a normative argument that way, and there would be legitimate discussion to be had about when to strengthen traditional norms to benefit the average person and when to weaken them to benefit outliers.
When you believe that the Bible is God’s Word – and that’s the conviction the Promise Keepers were working from – then it has the right to make normative claims that human prudence does not.
Sure. People are reluctant to teach women that they need to hold up their end even when their husbands sin against them.
In a culture that is so hostile to it, low decouplers – and most low decouplers are women – will hear that as, “He’s totally allowed to abuse you.” Some high decouplers will deliberately misinterpret it that way for rhetorical reasons. A pastor has the responsibility to distinguish the two and to break through honest misunderstanding where it occurs. But it’s difficult, and it’s risky, and too many shirk that duty.
That said, there are still going to be men who want to take the benefits without the responsibilities. Reminding them of their duties is noble work, as long as you don’t use it as excuse to ignore more common sins.
Edited to add the last paragraph.
Hieronymus
1mo ago
For that system to hold, its a 2 way street.
A real question, culturally, do men want the responsibilities, or just the perks?
I think that’s key. The church needs to teach men to do their part, even when women sin against them, and it needs to teach women to do their part, even when men sin against them. But it’s fine for a parachurch ministry, or a church’s men’s or women’s ministry, to focus on just one of these at a time.
I do think that such a ministry needs to be willing to frankly discuss the other side’s duties. But it would be odd if that were the primary focus.
Hieronymus
1mo ago
I haven't seen episode 8, I only read the plot summary to prepare myself for 9. So I have no view on how well handled it was, but I like the idea of the turn, marry me, and rule alongside me proposal. It's an interesting way of reprising Vader's offer to Luke.
How are you using the word mysticism here? I don’t think that personal devotion has been deëmphasized in Western Christianity. But mysticism proper was never as central to the Western church as it is to Eastern Orthodoxy today.
I don’t think I fully understand how you are drawing up your categories, so I apologize if this is a crude way of putting it. But if you are asking, “When did you guys stop being Palamist?”, the answer is that we never were.
Edit: To explain from another angle for the sake of clarity: I am treating mystical and supernatural as overlapping categories, not as synonyms.
My first reason is the less important of the two and may be futile, but I like to make a best effort at privacy: Watching YouTube logged out without persistent cookies, Google is probably doing a fair amount of tracking. Watching YouTube logged in, Google is definitely doing an awful lot of tracking.
Secondly, and more importantly, I prefer not to give money to de facto monopolies which participate in culture-war censorship. YouTube’s most obvious offenses from my perspective are on COVID, guns, and the alt-right broadly construed. If anyone has a more complete list, I am interested.
In a market with more intermediaries, focusing on niches is fine. If you want to restrict your little video platform to the five Quakers still adhering to the plain speech testimony, using “thee” instead of “you,” knock thyself out. But if YouTube starts banning every video containing the word “you,” that is best interpreted as an attempt at social control by a powerful company, and I don’t want to support it.
I used to give to a few creators through Patreon. But Patreon, then a de facto monopoly in its niche, began dropping right-wing creators and I stopped for the same reason. Now that there are SubscribeStar, Floatplane, etc., as alternatives, I should figure out whom I want to support and for how much and get back to it. And since Patreon is no longer a gatekeeper, I can also be comfortable giving through Patreon again.
I have also switched to buying books through Barnes & Noble rather than Amazon when I can, because Amazon started down the road to censorship. But it looks like maybe it has reversed course, so I should reëvaluate Amazon too.
Hieronymus
1mo ago
It's true that it'd fit the B5 setting, but I wouldn't have trusted the writers to do it well. Most of their handling of religion gave the impression of a good-faith attempt by people who have never met anyone that actually believes his religion in real life.
It did work well for the Centauri, though, given their sincere but not earnest regard for tradition.
Hieronymus
1mo ago
Thanks. That's not at all what I expected. Sad to read about.
Hieronymus
1mo ago
High school diplomas were a heavily discounted credential long before I ever heard of that policy, which was well after I was out of school. (Though I think I did have a teacher or two who used letter grades in their gradebooks; I didn't appreciate them enough at the time.)
Sincere question: If you are worried that this will make it impossible to fail, what do the distribution of a failing student's assignment and test grades look like without it? Are these students getting Cs on the homework and the teacher is relying on a 30% test grade to counterbalance them, or what?
Hieronymus
1mo ago
... many don't let you give anything lower than a 50.
I don't understand why this policy is so often compared to awful ones. It is the same as averaging the student's letter grades to come to a final grade, instead of averaging percentages. It makes missed work a normal F instead of a super-duper F. As an unknowing-ADHD kid who struggled with getting homework done, especially when I knew the material already, that would have been an incredible blessing that hurt my learning not at all.
Hieronymus
1mo ago
Are you comfortable saying which denomination you were raised in? That makes me curious.
Hieronymus
1mo ago
Have you not seen critics of the COVID vaccine (any COVID vaccine) consistently described as anti-vaxers? The only time I recall a serious offline conversation about this, an old friend took my criticism of the social dynamic as criticism of vaccines in general despite my explicit words to the contrary.
I think that we in the modern West struggle to understand these things because we have lost the understanding that intentionally tempting someone is a sin, and we have lost the ideas we need to discuss two people sinning against one another.
This can result in some unexpected and kind of weird Shiri’s scissors. Take the Baby It’s Cold Outside discourse: As the song is written, the male singer is trying to convince the female singer to stay the night by offering her a series of plausible excuses to do so; she kind of wants to but knows she shouldn’t, or at least that she’s expected not to. His tone is best described as playfully predatory.
That breaks people’s minds. Since there is no longer any socially acceptable category for culpable seduction, everyone tries to collapse the wave function into either “cute coming of age story” or “rape.” About ten years ago I heard a middle school choir (ages 11–14) perform the song with cigarettes and booze removed but sexual implications left altogether intact. On the other hand, people have been decrying the song’s radio play for years now on the grounds that it glorifies rape, which is the only moral category many people have for predatory sex.
Much of the yes-means-yes advocacy seemed to me to come from the same place. College girls had sex that they came to understand on some level was Not Okay. They (often correctly) accused college boys of exploiting them, and the boys (often correctly) pointed out that the sex was consensual. There is a natural temptation for everyone to claim innocence by projecting all the guilt onto the other party, but in this case the kids didn’t have a fighting chance: Their elders had robbed them of any moral categories outside “rape” and “not rape.”
So yes, I have known the Christian woman who sleeps with her boyfriend and, when asked, points out that this is what is expected of her to continue the relationship, and I acknowledge that this a real temptation placed upon her. I also know that she has a normal libido, and that on some level she was using the expectation as an excuse to do what she wanted to do. Her responsibility doesn’t render him innocent, and vice-versa.
I will certainly not claim to know how socially conservative secularists should navigate the current landscape. Both men and women have said that trying to do the right thing often feels like a sucker’s bet, and I believe them. I think that we in conservative churches can start by dating and marrying only sincere fellow believers, which we should be doing anyway. But that doesn’t address the underlying issue.
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