Soteriologian
1mo ago
This tension is noted in the gospels as well. See Matthew 9:
And it came to pass, as Jesus sat at meat in the house, behold, many publicans and sinners came and sat down with him and his disciples. And when the Pharisees saw it, they said unto his disciples, Why eateth your Master with publicans and sinners? But when Jesus heard that, he said unto them, They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick.
Believers go through all sorts of mental gymnastics to convince themselves that actually they are indeed super evil and thus deserving of the title "publicans and sinners", as satirized in this Matt & Trey parody of Mormonism where the main character envisions his damnation in hell with Hitler and all the other Bad People because he stole a donut when he was 5.
Of course, actual Protestant theology is even better: you’re condemned not because you ate the donut, but because Adam ate the donut. Err, apple. Well, okay, we don’t know it was an apple, it could have been any fruit (but was probably a fig since Adam and Eve used fig leaves to hide their nakedness). So, let’s say a Fig Newton. Anyway, the point is you inherited this Original Sin by your birth: you were born fallen.
Now that we’ve successfully self-flagellated, we can take our place at the table with the publicans and sinners and Jesus.
——
You can see why actual publicans and sinners find these people a bit insufferable at times.
Speaking of which, can someone turn this water into wine? I’m not a drinker, but I hear it makes these people go away, so that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.
Soteriologian
2mo ago
Did they bring back Zoltun Kul from D3? I loved that character so much.
Smuggest mofo in the underworld, right about absolutely everything, yet ignored and eventually killed by the good guys because they were too dumb to see it.
Then is resurrected by his own foresight to continue his smugmogging.
Absolute vibemaster.
Soteriologian
3mo ago
Who knows. YT shows me content I can’t watch all the time—I’ll click on result and get “you can’t watch this bc copyright.” Well then why did you fn recommend it to me, YT?
Anyway, I have other examples that I’m pretty sure have no relation to copyright. I think their system is just so laden with schizophrenic, contradictory rules that it ceases to function entirely for all but the daily slop from Approved Producers.
I have direct links to several YT videos that I can no longer find via search, even by typing the exact title of the video. Many of them aren’t even political, like Yundi Li’s performance of Beethoven sonatas.
I think it’s mostly because search today doesn’t even bother to do a search, it just spits back to you whatever slop Google feels like feeding you.
It’s sorta like how the thermostat in the office isn’t connected to anything; it’s just there to give the employees some illusion of control.
EDIT: in case anyone wants to try, here’s the Yundi Li performance I’m talking about. Nothing I type in search will bring up that video in the results.
Soteriologian
3mo ago
It's really weird that this happened by letter posted to twitter rather than an appearance in front of cameras.
Indeed. There’s a reason world leaders take more pics than a thirsty Instagram model on her first trip to Verona.
As much as we mock them, press conferences are as essential to the current political paradigm as PoW is to the Bitcoin blockchain. They are the mechanism by which consensus is demonstrated.
Soteriologian
4mo ago
There’s a reasonable case to be made that CrowdStrike isn’t a "real" company anyway: it’s a DeepState actor, worming its way into systems by enabling managers to check a box that satisfies regulatory compliance while giving wholesale control of their system to this opaque third-party.
Soteriologian
4mo ago
Exactly, they watch too much TV instead of looking at the actual data. The reason assassinations like Kennedy and Lincoln were unsuccessful were because the assassin went for the head, whereas in successful attempts like Roosevelt and Reagan, they aimed for the body.
Soteriologian
5mo ago
The establishment understands this, and is thus why they attack him with a wholly unparalleled ferocity
It’s less mindblowing than what happened to JFK.
Soteriologian
7mo ago
I think you’re leaving out that everyone wants services from a ‘big state’- stable currency, long range security, access to markets on favorable terms, etc.
Well, part of the contention is that runaway government spending will destabilise the dollar.
However the details play out, the bottom line is the population is aging: the old people aren’t going to vote away their entitlements, and the young people/immigrants are going to become increasingly hostile to the idea that their labor is being siphoned into making sure boomers have a comfortable retirement. Yeah, yeah, maybe the robots will solve all this. But in the event that they don’t, this is indeed a recipe for instability.
This dynamic is only exacerbated in a world where young people increasingly feel entitled to comfy white-collar work, rather than anything contributing to real industrial productive capacity.
Whether things will collapse in exactly the way Kulak predicts, god knows. But something, sometime, is going to give. You can’t just indefinitely accumulate parasites on the backs of fewer and fewer productive people.
Soteriologian
7mo ago
It’s a valid critique. Protestantism didn’t do so well in 1700s France, either, but not because Protestantism isn’t a viable culture; but because the surrounding system intentionally prevented it from functioning.
If capitalists don’t care to distinguish between “we actively sabotaged your system” and “your system doesn’t work”, perhaps by a tacit appeal to social Darwinism, then sure, I’ll accept that; but by the same token, I’ll point to the birth rates and say “just wait.”
Soteriologian
8mo ago
Atheists do admit we don’t know. The sneer is towards people who give asinine claims that they do and demand we submit to them politically.
If you say “I think there’s a God, but I don’t have any proof,” I’m not going to badger you about it. Heck, if you say, “I saw an angel appear in my toast and it told me to stay home from work this morning, and there was a shooting at my office later that day! But I fully accept that this evidence is only compelling to me, and that to anyone who hasn’t experienced angelic toast prophecy, this isn’t persuasive”, I’d still say okay, I can live with that.
What I have no patience for is people—generally not very cognitively gifted people—demanding that I accept their angelic toast as proof that I need to submit to their social structures (masquerading under the epistemic claim of acknowledging the supernatural). This is a blatant bait-and-switch for political power, and should be treated as such. What incenses the Abrahamic religions’ adherents so much is that secularists correctly perceive this as a political claim rather than an epistemic matter, and respond with hostility rather than quokka-tier “charity.”
Soteriologian
9mo ago
Not including food or energy (same thing, really) in the inflation number would be a good way to start.
Hence, The Atlantic featuring chin-scratching economists baffled by why the commoners won’t believe Biden’s economy is akshually fantastic (with the deeply insightful conclusion being huh, it turns out they’re concerned with exactly the thing we factored out of our metric).
Soteriologian
10mo ago
More generally, a lot of modernity serves the interests of a small minority of happily atomized PMC ‘decouplers’ who want to maximize their individual freedom at the expense of the institutions that allow for a more broad-based happiness. “I can gamble without getting addicted, so why shouldn’t I be allowed to? I can smoke mountains of 20%+ thc weed without losing all motivation and sitting on my couch watching SpongeBob all day, so why shouldn’t I be allowed to? I can find meaning and happiness in hedonism, consumption and career success, so why shouldn’t we abandon traditional forms of spirituality? I can have casual sex with many people without any physical harm or psychological damage coming to me, so why shouldn’t I be able to without condemnation?” The problem comes if freeing these people from the chains of tradition and obligation actively damages the lives of many others, and I think it does.
Agree with this analysis, although I'm not sure what to do about it. Virtually all progress comes from this group, and I find their arguments coherent and compelling. Yet at the same time, I cannot deny that for many, this does not work and is not what they want. This is most apparent in free speech advocacy. Back when tech was not just created by but run by nerds, there was no censorship or moderation. You could say whatever you wanted - getting banned wasn't even a thing. But once the plebe hordes arrived, they demanded that the internet not be that way, and now you have some longhouse marm listening in on your teamspeak when playing Overwatch, making sure you don't say any mean words or you get a banslap. And the plebes like this! They think it's progress and celebrate it! To the extent that there's any disagreement among them, it's not over the censor button itself, but slapfighting over who is the one in charge of the censorship.
While my disdain is not exactly concealed, I do acknowledge that for many, freedom doesn't work that well. You let them eat whatever they want and they just stuff themselves until they're like a fn balloon. You let them buy opiates and they turn themselves into a zombie infestation on the streets. It's completely ridiculous, but I cannot deny that this is objectively what happens for a good chunk of the population. Whatever I may think of their epistemics and philosophy, the results speak for themselves: being denied the freedom to fuck up objectively improves the lives of many. Further, whatever elegant philosophical foundation high-decoupling freedom advocates have, de facto their policies are Darwinian accelerationism: "If the plebes want to eat until they bust, well then so be it, let them bust." But judging by the fertility stats, we've already accelerated to a degree that may well crash the entire species. However beautiful I may find the philosophical underpinnings of liberalism, I am at least clearheaded enough to concede that the collapse of the species is a bad thing, and whatever caused that should probably be reconsidered.
Where this leaves me, I don't know, other than to say annoyed and unsettled. I don't want to be subjected to their petty nonsense, but I also don't want humanity to collapse, so... I don't know, maybe stuff them back in their matrix pods while I walk free? But of course there's little room for that in my philosophy, and advocating so is a stain on my soul.
Maybe if we could set it up in such a way that they're technically putting themselves in the matrix pods while I walk free... ponders
Soteriologian
1yr ago
as far as I know we'd have to be doing frequent callbacks to update some saved serverside field
You can save drafts client side, via the local storage API.
I mean, there was a recent fiasco with a guy shooting his gun with the scope on backwards. And it wasn’t some low-ranking cannon fodder recruited for Operation Human Shield; he was captain of a big ship! And he wasn’t a diversity hire, either—he’s a white male!
Like, just ponder for a moment the level of smoothbrain it takes to do this: looking through the scope backwards would make your target smaller.
I would not trust these people to run a lemonade stand.
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