TitaniumButterfly

TitaniumButterfly 1d ago

And since I'm bored and we're being pedantic anyway, it'd be AD 0, not 0 AD.

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TitaniumButterfly 1d ago · Edited 1d ago

I shouldn't need to go to church to defer my kid's sexual awakening until they have a meaningful boner.

Why else would you want that? If there's no absolute standard, anything goes. Guess you could make some argument that it's bad for them, but then you'd need to demonstrate that such a thing as 'bad' exists (i.e. an 'ought' rather than an 'is') and also that things wouldn't just work out if we all stopped worrying so much about sexualizing children.

Or, for that matter, owning slaves or murdering infants, or selling unwanted daughters into prostitution. Going to the next tribe over and killing, raping, and plundering. You know, standard human behavior sans Christ.

People are going to do what they're going to do. It's impossible to call it wrong without reference to a higher authority. One can point to cultural norms but, as we see here, that's ultimately a losing game. You can (physically) attempt to stop them, but not under any kind of rubric of right or wrong. And then the universe burns out (or blows apart) anyway.

-3

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TitaniumButterfly 1d ago

Who has any right to land? Either you can defend it or someone else will have it. There's only 'is' here, no 'ought'.

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TitaniumButterfly 2d ago · Edited 2d ago

Well, yes -- part of Ireland is already the UK and if the rest were to unite with the UK I wouldn't be losing sleep over the erasure of the Irish as a people. Scotland already did, and it's still there. Wales too. Sure they'd like to be independent but that's clearly a want, not a need.

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TitaniumButterfly 2d ago

Sure; such things can be subdivided fractally. But if I heard all those people were henceforth to be under a single government I wouldn't be thinking "Oh no the unique Austrian culture will now be subsumed into Greater Mitteleuropa!" It would make a lot of sense for them to share a government IMO.

Though, the Swiss have a long history of self-government which is unlike anything to be found in Ukraine, so I doubt they'd be much interested. Else they'd be in the EU.

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TitaniumButterfly 2d ago

Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't the Russian-controlled parts of Ukraine heavily ethnically Russian, and weren't the Ukrainians pursuing a similar policy of forcible assimilation? (I may well be wrong.)

Ukraine has often been part of Russia and their distinctiveness has always seemed to me tenuous at best. FWIW I developed this opinion over a decade ago after spending some time with Ukrainians in the US who were very insistent that they're totally different from Russians and gave me several examples which left me entirely unconvinced. Basically everything came down to regional vocabulary differences. That's not a matrioshka doll, it's a $ukrainian_word_for_exact_same_thing! Based on my mostly-uninformed assessment, Ukrainian can't really be called a dialect of Russian but they have like 2/3 overlap and from a cultural standpoint they're nearly indistinguishable. Easy for an outsider to think, I suppose.

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TitaniumButterfly 2d ago

It's not a war of extermination, they can survive the dissolution of Ukraine as a state

It's not clear that Ukraine as a people can survive continued war. Their demographics were already terrible and tons of dead and fleeing reproductive-age people occurs to me as likely to be fatal. Then again the worst case scenario has already basically happened, so yeah, I guess they may as well ride the thing to zero. Sucks for the ones who wanted to live though.

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TitaniumButterfly 4d ago

No; Christianity has always (until very recently and only in the West) understood that there are many, many gods, divine beings, whatever you want to call them. Our conception of 'monotheism' is incredibly anachronistic and silly. I'm unaware of any monotheistic religions.

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TitaniumButterfly 4d ago

Christianity says that our ancestors were all wrong, for thousands of years, and then a guy in the middle east figured out the truth

No, this is definitely not what Christianity says. Not that our ancestors were all wrong, and not that a guy 'figured out' the truth.

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TitaniumButterfly 9d ago · Edited 9d ago

Yeah, pretty much. My model indicates that people who end up in power don't tend to have such hangups, though they'll definitely use rhetoric along those lines to get what they want.

'Keep fighting an unwinnable war because we love the (extremely recent) independence of Ukraine so much' is an odd stance for any competent person to take. Typically elites have lots of options including taking substantial assets elsewhere. Choosing to wipe out one's own population to prolong the inevitable doesn't strike me as particularly nationalistic either. Enough men are dead, and women are fled, that Ukraine as a concept is unrecoverable. There will be no substantial next generation. Why does it matter who the nominal rulers are, of empty farmland and disintegrating cities? Ukraine is gone.

So especially in that (famously corrupt) part of the world my expectation is that those in power are looking to take what they can from the situation, at whatever expense to the commoners, and make good their escape.

That anyone could believe otherwise makes me feel kind of sick. Lambs to the slaughter. What a wicked world.

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TitaniumButterfly 11d ago

It's more that I have a hard time believing that the people in control aren't looking to gain something here, but are truly that ideologically committed.

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TitaniumButterfly 11d ago

Where do commercial interests fit in? Is there some class of Ukrainian leadership/economic heavyweights which is hoping to gain from protracted slow-rolling defeat?

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TitaniumButterfly 11d ago

Zelensky would get assassinated if he tried

By whom? Who's the power behind Ukraine staying in the war? What is it hoping to achieve? Been looking for analysis on this for a while and not found any.

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TitaniumButterfly 11d ago

Yes.

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TitaniumButterfly 11d ago

They could stop

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TitaniumButterfly 15d ago

I believe he's referring to 1967, not the Summer of Floyd.

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TitaniumButterfly 15d ago

Perhaps it's time to start ~~bestowing quests~~ offering opportunities to ~~low-level PCs~~ children and the unemployed. Collect ten rat rails in exchange for a few coins and rep with the City Council.

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TitaniumButterfly 15d ago

Some did! Lost the source but I read that something like 20% of the garbage workers were women, though life experience has taught me that they were probably not actually doing the same work as the men. Can't help but wonder how all of this occurs to the women who were willing and able to do the job. Their perspective hasn't been represented anywhere that I've found.

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TitaniumButterfly 15d ago

a few years ago, I read through Michael Knox Beran's "WASPS: The Splendors and Miseries of an American Aristocracy"

Thanks for the rec! I've been thirsty for something exactly like this but didn't know where to begin looking. Serendipitous.

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https://x.com/lara_e_brown/status/1909607333090513144

TitaniumButterfly 15d ago · Edited 15d ago

I can't be the only one getting tired of the same couple topics, so here's some comparatively lighthearted fare. Well — if one can call lighthearted anything involving a first-world nation flirting with plague.

The Birmingham bin strike has reached its fifth week. Rubbish is piled high, rats are infesting the streets, and experts are concerned about Weil's disease.

🧵on how the Equality Act contributed to this, and how it may cause similar strikes across the country.

1/ In 2012, 174 former Birmingham Council employees brought an equal pay appeal to the Supreme Court.

They argued Birmingham City Council had provided lower pay to women in predominantly female jobs (cooks, cleaners & care staff) compared to refuse collectors and road workers.

Long story short: The Birmingham City Council employed (employed) garbagemen, roadworkers, and grave diggers, who naturally were mostly men. They also employ cooks, cleaners, and caregivers for the elderly; these are mostly women.

At some point someone noticed that the former set of workers tended to earn more than the latter. A lawsuit was launched which argued that this was obvious sexism and a violation of the Equality Act since, in aggregate, male employees were getting paid more than female employees. The lawsuit succeeded, which spawned countless followup lawsuits. Any woman working in a job which paid less than a typically-male job was suddenly able to sue for damages, and consequently the Council has paid out over a billion pounds in equal pay compensation. The Council estimates that it is likely to have to pay an additional 800 million or so pounds before the thing has run its course.

Naturally, they also had to fix the problem, and so slashed the pay of garbagemen, road workers, grave diggers, and so on to match the female average. (Raising female pay to the male level would have been untenable before paying out >£1B, and certainly isn't possible now, as they're already basically bankrupted.) Unfortunately, it seems that people aren't interested in doing those jobs for so much less pay, and have declined to continue.

Result: Ever-growing piles of garbage all over the place, leading to a massive population of disease-bearing rodents and other pests. Weil's disease and hantavirus are suddenly major concerns. And, as the average daily temperature rises, the already-unspeakable miasma is getting worse. And no one can do anything about it, since, afaict, it's not allowed for the private sector to 'compete' with the government.

No one's even arguing that it's different pay for the same job. It's universally agreed that it's different pay for different jobs. However, the rhetoric here has to do with the value of the job not economically, but in some ineffable moral sense. Supporters of the move argue that surely the 'value' of the predominantly-female jobs must be the same as the predominantly-male jobs. To think otherwise would apparently imply that female labor is less 'valuable' than male labor, which in turn would imply that women are less 'valuable' than men.

What can one say in reply? It's one of those things where all one can do is shake one's head. Especially in Birmingham, where anyone considering pointing out some obvious considerations on the matter is liable to be charged with misogyny. And modern polite white society doesn't seem to have any kind of defense against women's tears.

All in all it's one of the clearest examples I've ever seen of wokeness destroying a society's ability to perform basic functions.

Birmingham is, FWIW, the economic and cultural center of the Midlands region, and Britain's second-largest city after London. Now it's facing problems which sound like something out of its medieval era.

And I have to wonder: if it happened there, can it happen in London?

To add some of my own commentary, this seems to me an example of the impossibility of compromise with wokeness. There can be no detente. Wokeness can never rest until it has erased all practical distinctions between human beings, and one generation's gracious, ostensibly common-sensical compromise ('equal pay for the same job') not only doesn't address the real problem but serves as a springboard for the next generation's 'equal pay for different jobs', e.g.

The fundamental relationship between men and women hasn't been harmonious since Eden at the latest, but it has at least remained functional throughout most of history. When I see the above, it occurs to me that one side effect is even fewer men able to generate enough income to provide for a family or maintain the respect of potential mates. Another straw on the camel's back.

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TitaniumButterfly 17d ago

Also, it calls LotR a 'trilogy'. Who is going to be pedantic about such things if not MENSA?

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TitaniumButterfly 17d ago

What does Trump have to do with this?

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TitaniumButterfly 18d ago

…In the Latin, Aristotelian line, God was being, but not becoming; God was unchanging but not changing; God was simple and not multiple; God was static and not moving, not dynamic, and so on. Whereas the Bible, or how the Eastern Fathers, like Gregory and Basil and the other Gregory and Maximos and Simian and others said — especially Dionysius — they said, ‘No; God is completely different! God’s not like anything that exists. God is beyond being. He’s beyond becoming, beyond un-being. That in God, the one and the many — God isn’t one as opposed to many; God is beyond one and many. But He reveals Himself to us as being itself, as goodness itself, love itself, truth itself… but He also reveals Himself in a multiplicity, countless number of the divine actions and energies because He is the living God, and these operations or actions or energies of God, His speaking, His acting, His being angry, His revealing Himself, His hiding Himself — these are all real. God is a living God. He’s beyond anything in the created order. We can’t simply identify Him with ‘being’. In fact, Gregory of Palamas will say, ‘If God is being, I am not. If I am being, God is not. If God is, I am not. If I am, God is not.’ What he meant by that is, you can’t use the term ‘being’ for God and for creation in the same way.

Now if you say that ‘God is’, then you have to qualify that God is beyond anything. For example, if a Christian was, let’s say, walking down the street, and wearing a cross, and some person came up to him and said ‘Hey, are you a Christian, you’re a believer, you have that cross on?’ Say ‘Yeah’. And then if the person said, ‘Do you believe God exists?’ And of course the first Christian answer would be ‘Yes, of course. We believe God exists.’ But if we were really doing our duty, according to the Bible and according to the Holy Fathers — certainly according to St. Gregory of Palamas — we would say to that person, ‘You have a minute? Let’s chat.’ And then we’d say to that person, ‘You know, I just said to you “God exists.” And by that I mean, yes, there is God. Yes. It is not true that there is no God. There is God. But, if you think that God exists like I exist, or you exist, or that building or that tree exists, or even like the planet Earth exists, or like the hundred billion galaxies with the hundred billion stars in the expanding universe exist, then we would have to say God does not exist. God brings into existence creatures who can say that they exist. But God is beyond existence. He’s even beyond non-existence.’

In his summary of the patristic writings that he wrote in the Ninth Century, St. John of Damascus said, ‘God is not only beyond being, He’s beyond non-being.’ That we have to negate even the negations that we make about God. Because if we say that God does not exist like the creation exists, that concept would even be somehow contingent upon an idea of creation. But God, as Prophet Isaiah said [a] long time before Jesus, ‘God doesn’t have any comparisons.’ There’s nothing in Heaven and on Earth to compare with Him. As it was already revealed to the men and women of the old covenant, God is holy. Kadosha, holy. And ‘holy’ means not like anything else. It means completely different; completely other. Like there’s nothing you can say about God but just to contemplate His activities in silence. St. Gregory of Nyssa says, quoting Psalm 116, ‘If we dare to speak about God, then every man is a liar.’ ‘Cause whatever we say, we have to correct somehow. Even the great Englishman and great theological writer, John Henry Newman, who was a Church of England person who became a Roman Catholic, mainly because of the Church Fathers, he said that theology for a Christian is ‘saying and unsaying to a positive effect’. Metropolitan Kallistos Ware quoted that once. I loved it. He says that that’s the same thing that the Eastern Church Fathers say. Theology is saying and unsaying for a positive effect. For a good reason. Because you affirm something — in technical language, that’s called cataphatic — and then you negate it. That’s called apophatic. And so when you say anything about what God is or what God is like, you can say it! You can say ‘God exists, God is good, God is love’, but immediately you have to correct it and say, ‘not like being and not like goodness and not like love that we can capture with our mind. God is way beyond that.’

Nevertheless, He acts. He speaks. He shows Himself. As Gregory of Nyssa said way back in the Fourth Century, ‘His actions and operations,’ he said, ‘they descend even unto us.’

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