Stellula
2d ago
Evangelicals are hated by elites, and they generally hate elites in return.
This is just demonstrably not true. How many members of the current President's cabinet are evangelicals? One of the primary debates happening around our politics right now is funding for Israel, which is something almost entirely pushed by evangelical protestants.
I think that there tend to me bore Catholic intellectuals (like members of the Supreme Court); I think that's where the cleave happens.
Stellula
2d ago
Not many! How many at your local parish are reading those? How many even follow the Church's teaching on contraception or abortion?
A lot. These people are Doctors of the Church. Protestants have this idea of "sola scriptura", or that the only thing that matters is The Bible, but Catholics just...don't. We treat our religion as a legitimate academic and philosophical pursuit, and so stuff like that is a frequent point of reference. If you want more contemporaries to listen to: listen to any of the Bishop Robert Barron interviews and see how long he can go without referencing things like this.
Stellula
2d ago
What’s the point here? If Reddit claimed itself as a Christian church, there would be more Redditors than Catholics too. They could say that posting on Reddit is “attending church”, that being a Reddit moderator is being a “pastor”, claim each subreddit as a denomination even!
The point here is about how seriously a conversion by Vivek would be taken. Vivek attending a mega church every week would move the needle either 0 or negatively.
Stellula
2d ago
Great, now like I’ve asked multiple times: link me to a contemporary Protestant apologist who you think has done a good job in a debate with a Catholic, please?
Here’s one: https://youtube.com/live/kn7qdPSHSJk
I guess you could just say that Protestants don’t really do debates or think about their claims academically, which I would agree with.
I do think this guy did a pretty good job, but again I think that he’s on kindof an impossible mission here. Protestant claims, especially claims like “sola scriptura” don’t even stand up to basic middle school level scrutiny.
Btw, to make my point you don’t even have to be Catholic! If Vivek converted to Orthodoxy, that would still be more meaningful than Protestantism, or even Mormonism! Mormons are serious, make serious contemporary attempts at apologetics (which I do think fail pretty quickly), and genuinely seem to be serious about what they’re saying.
Protestants just…don’t. It doesn’t even seem like they’re trying anymore. Protestants aren’t generally appealing to people intellectually, that’s why it’s coffee shops and laser projectors and carnival rides in the parking lot.
Protestants can claim everyone else from his era
This is now just now true Scotsman. How many of the people are your local mega church are reading or talking about or thinking about or even know who Saint Augustine is? Are a lot of them reading The Summa do you suppose? I can think of a Protestant friend in “seminary” right now and how he reacted when I asked him about this, and I’m going to tell you the answer is no. No, finding one example of one person at one “seminary” who referenced this one time does not matter to the general point I’m making here.
I asked another person here who hasn't responded either: can you link me to some examples of what you mean when you say "serious" protestants?
I can point you to...like Pope Benedict, who wrote books such as Introduction to Christianity, obvious people like Saint Augustine or Thomas Acquinas, or even just normie youtubers like Trent Horne. If somebody asked me "show me who the serious Catholics are" it would be them.
Who are the equivalent protestant "fathers"? CS Lewis is one, but who are other "serious" protestant philosophers, or contemporary apologists? Is the Anglican lady who just became their Archbishop putting out any meaningful intellectual work? Or is Sean Rowe? Is Tracey Malone contributing anything meaningful to the discourse? Or Mariann Edgar Budde? I know she did a real scathing sermon about Trump last year at the national prayer breakfast, but are people reading "How We Learn to Be Brave: Decisive Moments in Life and Faith" and getting some important theology insight from it?
These are the leaders of various protestant churches. Which one is the most academically serious or would you think of as a good representation of what you mean when you think of "serious" protestants?
I have to be honest, this seems like you, personally, have a disdain for Protestantism's decentralization and comparative lack of ritual.
This is a colorful way of saying: "you have experienced a lot of protestants and have formed an opinion on their beliefs and activities" which...is just how anybody could form any opinion about anything in the world? What is even the point of saying this? "Gee it sure seems like you think stuff"?
Stellula
3d ago
Link it. Is there a good formal debate I could watch that you think represents a good example of “academic” Protestantism?
Also what’s the strawman here, exactly? If Vivek started a new Protestant church tomorrow, who has the authority to say it’s fake?
Stellula
4d ago
I think the most depressing part is knowing that your TOTAL lifetime tax liability is around $1M.
These people stole the LIFETIME tax output of around 10,000 people.
Taxes are a huge burden on people. They’re one of the major things our politics are decided on. If I don’t pay these, or even if I mess them up, I’ll go to jail. CPAs are an entire, large, industry.
We’re all paying these things, and 10,000 peoples lifetime of burden to the government just gets robbed.
I pay taxes (a LOT of taxes), I obey the laws, drive the speed limit etc. and then I turn on the internet and see stuff like this, people just openly robbing stores and filming themselves do it, see violent criminals released into my neighborhood etc.
Kindof hard to stomach honestly.
What I mean is that Protestants are not intellectually serious, and that most of the claims keeping people in their church don’t stand up to basic scrutiny.
“The Church is hiding the Bible from you they don’t want you to read it only WE have the true words of God!” was a convincing argument when it wasn’t easy to find out that this is just very literally not true.
As far as conversation to Protestantism being unserious: not only could I become a Protestant tomorrow if I wanted to, I could become a Protestant pastor, and so could Vivek.
Vivek Could announce tomorrow that he is starting a church, could call it a “Christian” church, and go around trying to convince people in Ohio that he’s a very serious Christian of some kind.
But this would all take 5 minutes, and be meaningless.
If he wanted to become Catholic, there’s a process to it, he’d need to get his marriage convalidated, baptize his kids, etc. If he wanted to become a priest (to contrast this with the seriousness of becoming a Protestant pastor), it would take him around a decade of philosophy and theology classes, he’d need to leave his family, etc. (Although I'm not sure The Church would take
That’s the point I’m making. It Vivek went through OCIA, got confirmed, convalidated his marriage, went to mass at least weekly, and baptized his kids, I think people would see it as more likely to be genuine.
If he showed up at some mega church or revivalist thing a few times and bought a Bible, I think it would read as performative.
Stellula
5d ago
Can you link me to an example of a church where, if Vivek Ramaswami converted to it, Americans would see this as a strong signal that he was all in on America?
Stellula
5d ago
Doesn't this prove my point pretty cleanly? The Mennonites are not using the internet.
Stellula
6d ago
I think the internet has just been devastating for Protestantism. I don’t really think there are any “serious” Protestants left.
If Vivek “converted” to some pointless Evangelical mega church, it would just feel hollow and unserious.
Catholics (and I include the orthodox in this) have basically just won. Protestantism isn’t taken seriously anymore, and so a “conversion” to Protestantism would similarly not be taken seriously.
Stellula
7d ago
I think you’re hitting the core here.
If Vivek moved here, converted to Catholicism, named his kids Sean and Brad, starter personally going by Jim and became an obsessive football fan, maybe I’d buy it.
Because that’s basically what my ancestors did. They changed their names, punished their kids if they tried to speak the old language, named their kids almost comically American names, and just thanked god they were allowed to be here. They wanted to be American not lecture Americans on how to be better.
Four generations from now if some Vivek descendant wants to “rediscover their roots”, then fine. But America does have a culture, actually, and if you want to be an American the good news is they you can! You just have to actually do it.
Stellula
15d ago
God knows that it is our fate to spend our lives in the darkness, and knows that we'll need a light.
C is the language which feels like it can get us out, but python is the language that will be there for us when we can't.
I just watched the preview for this, and it's funny how quickly red/blue tropes shifted.
When this was made I imagine that the family is meant to be taken as fun loving, goofy, and obviously blue, where as SJP is meant to be taken as stuffy, uptight, and obviously red. (edit: I just read the plout outline and one of the family members is a gay, black, deaf man who adopts a child with his gay lover)
But my initial read when watching the preview was that this was a story about an uptight leftist/frigid/HR/feminist type having to spend the holidays with a bunch of conservatives.
Stellula
15d ago
Central planning fails again.
Every single time. This happens every time where you try to engineer around the existence of the human soul, and it will continue to happen, forever. There is a war going on between the ensouled and the enslaved, and you can see it playing out here. The enslaved, who occupy places like HR departments, CPS field agencies, reddit moderation discords, city ordinance compliance departments, HOA boards, and Rust governance bodies, fight against the idea that an ensouled human being might have their own ideas about how to live their life, or how to manage the memory on their own computer.
C is god's language, and as counterintuitive as it may sound: so is python. All other languages exist only to build a path towards enslavement.
Stellula
20d ago
imagine the smell
If any of you are on the tech/ai/startup side of x (which I imagine is everybody here), you probably saw the following exchange:
-
A guy working as 'head of AI' for a company called Cline commented "Imagine the smell" under a photo of a hackathon.
-
Indians assumed that somebody commenting on the smellyness of a hackathon (I've been to many hackathons, and nerds smell) must be commenting on Indians, and thus freaked out.
-
The guy who made the comment replied to some of them saying that no, actually, he was just making a common internetism, and generally speaking to the smell of a bunch of guys in a packed room.
-
The guy's boss gets involved, surely due to the campaign by online Indians to get him fired, saying that he wouldn't be firing anybody.
-
Enough pressure happened that the guy's boss recanted, and fired the guy.
-
Now the internet is imagining a lot of smells, cline has earned a ton of bad will, and the general dislike of Indians in the tech community has grown.
Here are some thoughts on this:
-
I'm increasingly of the opinion that people should be able to filter the internet by country. I don't care what people from 9000 miles away, from a totally different culture, who have no investment or stake in my society have to say about it. I don't want to interact with these people. My life and my world is not a place for them to wage petty dramas and entertain themselves by harassing people here.
-
Indians specifically (and I say this as somebody who has spent a considerable amount of time in India, consuming indian culturalisms, and interacting with Indians) seem to have a particular penchant for online drama. There seems to be a particular focus on people saving or losing some form of "face", although that isn't exactly it. It's similar to honor culture you find in other societies, but maybe just its own Indian brand of it. I think what we're seeing here are two cultures which should be separated by 10,000 miles of ocean running into each other on the internet; the clash should not be unexpected.
-
"Imagine the smell" is not an anti-Indian slur, or at least it wasn't. It comes from image boards, and gets said under almost any moderately interesting photo of people. However, I think the massive freak out over this has turned it into one. Interdesting.
Stellula
1mo ago
Just to further drive this point home: the narcos are engaged in what is effectively chemical warfare. They are in the process of violating the GC when they were shot out of the water.
Stellula
1mo ago
ChatGPT answered this question just find.
Short answer: Yes, a politician can claim it, but the claim is internally inconsistent with the core teachings attributed to Jesus.
Here’s the clean breakdown without soft-pedaling anything:
- What Jesus actually commanded
Jesus’s explicit moral directives include: • Radical, unilateral compassion (Matthew 5–7). • Care for the foreigner (Matthew 25; repeated in Torah citations). • Protection of the poor and vulnerable. • Refusal to use coercive force in moral disputes (“put your sword back”).
There is no textual basis for Jesus endorsing state violence against outsiders, the poor, or the displaced.
- What ICE does
ICE agents: • Track and seize impoverished people, often with guns drawn. • Separate families. • Transport and deport them by force. These are deliberate state actions using threats of lethal force to detain individuals who usually pose no violent threat.
- The contradiction
A politician who: 1. Publicly claims to follow Jesus’s teachings and simultaneously 2. Supports the state hunting down poor foreigners at gunpoint and removing them from the country
…is making a claim that conflicts with the documented ethical demands Jesus laid down.
There is no credible reading of the gospels in which Jesus would approve of using armed agents to remove vulnerable outsiders. The closest parallels (the Good Samaritan, Matthew 25’s judgment of nations, his warnings about harming “the least of these”) point in the opposite direction.
- So would Jesus be disappointed?
Based solely on the text: Yes. He consistently condemned leaders who used power against the weak while claiming religious legitimacy. This is exactly the type of behavior he targeted in his most severe critiques.
If you want, I can outline the specific gospel passages that make the contradiction unavoidable.
Stellula
1mo ago
Regardless of the specifics of handmaids tale, my general point is that debating surrogacy is well, well within the Overton window right now.
Well the first thing he is obviously trolling, and the second two are pretty benign.
Surrogacy basically the plot of handmaid's tale. It seems like there's quite a bit of resistance against that.
And as far as people with dual citizenship not being Americans - this is also self evidently true. There are some semantics that could be worked here, but there is certainly a different class of American who would have dual citizenship. Is a person in a polyamorous marriage really married in the classic sense to their husband? I mean...yes...sortof, but also not really.
Stellula
1mo ago
Why don’t we flip this.
What are some policy positions of Fuentes that you don’t like?
Not trolling or trying to be funny, but actual consistent positions?
Stellula
1mo ago
One of the crazier things to see here is the normie Jewish response.
To call us dual loyalists is an anti semetic dog whistle. Also I voted for Trump due to his support of Israel, and see Fuentes talk like this, against Israel, has got me angry. I’m not voting for Trump anymore now.
Huh?
Anti semetic tropes like the idea that the Jews killed Jesus when it was the Romans!
Yes yes the Jews didn’t kill Jesus they just lobbied the local government to do it for them, which sounds like a Larry David sketch FFS.
Eric Weinstein posted something on twitter the other day attacking the idea of dual loyalty, and pointed out that people asked the same question of Kennedy. Yes Eric, they did. Was it because they were Nazis? Or maybe this is just a reasonable question? Perhaps infinitely more reasonable to ask a Jew than a Catholic when we aren’t sending missiles to the Vatican and I can’t ever move there if I want and there aren’t any senators saying they want to the Vatican’s number one representative in congress?
And then of course there is Ben Shapiro himself, saying his loyalty to America is “backstopped” by the existence of Israel, because if America ever makes him mad he can just leave and go there - but don’t ever dare suggest that he might have dual loyalty.
The duplicity of all of this is staggering.
Stellula
2mo ago
In any case, as I've mentioned before, we don't get paid to manage stuff like this - usually go home and relax is the treatment. We get paid to manage your aunt who is on 8 medications for chronic conditions including hypertension, diabetes, heart failure and s/p hysterectomy for 3a cancer who we see every 4-6 weeks instead of once a year.
We are arguing the exact same thing now. The people who are talking to those people should NOT be the person I am talking to for a fever and a sore throat. Thats the absurd inefficiency.
I basically need to talk to a pharmacist, not a doctor.
Okay. It Vivek converts to Mennonism, stops using the internet, moves to a farm, and gets rid of his car, I think people would take the conversion seriously.
More options
Context Copy link