TitaniumButterfly
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User ID: 2854
TitaniumButterfly
9d ago
Was Huckleberry Finn equipped to make that call, or should he have sent Hard-R Jim back into bondage?
Ultimately he has to follow his conviction, as we all do.
"God will decide for me whether I survive this flood."
"I sent you two boats and a helicopter!"
Probably my fault but I'm not grasping the relevance.
TitaniumButterfly
9d ago
Lizzardspawn has made the the anti-Mauritian forces so efficient that now all the work is done by a single Australian man.
TitaniumButterfly
12d ago
On that note I've long wondered whether nicotine pouches are classified as tobacco products.
TitaniumButterfly
12d ago
All it did was make me think. Never landed at any conclusions.
TitaniumButterfly
12d ago
I don't think that intelligence is correlated with mental illness in white people. Jews are just neurotic.
TitaniumButterfly
13d ago
What kind of prompt gets that output?
TitaniumButterfly
13d ago
Yeah, lots of LSAT questions are this way. It's not pick a correct answer, it's pick the most correct answer.
TitaniumButterfly
13d ago
There is no answer. IQ is genetic.
This implies some answers.
TitaniumButterfly
13d ago
The LSAT is heavily g-loaded. Most people simply aren't constitutionally capable of doing that kind of thinking.
TitaniumButterfly
13d ago
literal firehose of propaganda
🤔
I don't disagree, but it wouldn't be hard to based upon how one defines 'morality'. What it means to be moral is rarely even discussed, perhaps because the once-bedrock shared understandings which would have made such conversation possible have been so badly eroded. This occurs to me as concerning.
It is far better, morally speaking, to be a virtuous loser than a vicious winner.
What would you say to someone who asks 'why?'
TitaniumButterfly
14d ago
Man I knew there was a joke in there but couldn't find it.
TitaniumButterfly
14d ago
Where does "The clergy are wrong about God's will" fit in this schema?
It's a thorny issue to be sure and relies upon what could be called ineffability to work, i.e. there's no satisfactory intellectual answer from just about any standpoint.
A Christian should be obedient to his priest and the church hierarchy in most cases. However, the hierarchy is made up of humans, who can and do go wrong. At the individual scale this can be devastating and 'should I ignore my priest about this' is a very uncomfortable question for a Christian to ever have to ask. The reality is that most people aren't really equipped to make that call. Ideally the problem is fixed by those priests being accountable to bishops and so on, but in practice the whole system can and does fail. Then again, at one point the Orthodox patriarchs and bishops all decided to reunite with the Church of Rome under the Pope, and the laity stood firm and told them 'no', and the hierarchy demurred.
What we have is a system where we all understand that human components sometimes fail, sometimes en masse, and yet we believe that Christ in His capacity as the head of the Church makes it work out anyway. It's gotten us this far.
What about "God gave us the firewood, but expects us to light the match"?
Example?
TitaniumButterfly
14d ago
To be honest I don't know enough about the Nazis to have an opinion there, but in human politics leftism generally means organizing the masses against the elites by appealing to 'equity', so it'd be hard to call the Soviets anything else.
early Christianity was leftist by the standards of its time
Not at all. In this case the 'elite' in question is God and conforming to that hierarchy was absolute. Nor were early Christians particularly interested in overthrowing the (human) elites of their day.
TitaniumButterfly
16d ago
utility monster sub groups that are net-tax negative, coming in and bleeding the liberal welfare state dry (as an aside, it still amazes me that people think immigration is a solution to social security pension problems. It’s like throwing gasoline on the fire!).
My favorite metaphor is a galley propelled by rowers at the oar-benches. As the rowers start to age out, the galley loses speed. Someone gets the idea to replace old rowers with stone statues of rowers. Obviously this is counterproductive and rapidly starts to spiral, but anyone who objects is thrown overboard.
people will eventually realize that trying to crush their ideological enemies underfoot has a tendency to backfire and that the revolution always eats her children. This is little consolation to those of us who have to live through it, but so it goes.
Is that true for everyone, or just for leftists?
I see the right/left divide as basically being one of hierarchy/'equity', and since equity isn't a reality-based ideology it's gonna be prone to backfiring, yeah. But I see no reason that an ideological system involving uniting the elites to rule over the rest is a problem, at least until those elites hit upon the idea of organizing the masses against competing elites on grounds of equity, at which point we're back to leftism.
ETA: While I'm here, I'd like to point out that leftism is inherently satanic in the literal sense. On the one hand we have "God is God and you are not and He knows best" and on the other "You can be like God and decide for yourself as well or better than He can decide for you." This latter sentiment is known as pride.
A concern for me is very much how political the whole situation was. I have no doubt that had a re-elected Trump been the one to institute those measures the left would have been screaming bloody murder about liberty (correctly). That they were willing to support the measures due in no small part to the fact that their political opponents (also correctly) objected was terrifying.
I subscribe to the ape theory of human politics, which indicates that the basic function of politics is to let coalitions define themselves as an ingroup, gain supremacy over the outgroup, and derive outsized resources at their expense. It's the only game our species knows how to play. That seems to have been on display here.
TitaniumButterfly
16d ago
Sure, but what is Christian metaphysics rooted in, then?
Man's experience with God.
I sense an implication in your words that I am less correct than you are because my belief is less coherent.
My apologies then as that was not my intention. My point here is that complaining about the perceived immorality of God as Christians understand Him is silly, if I'm being nice, and cringeworthy if I'm not.
But your coherency doesn't look valuable to me because from my perspective, some guy just picked a bunch of beliefs he and his acolytes had 2000 years ago and arbitrarily declared them to lie along one axis (God).
I don't see anything arbitrary about it, even from your perspective, unless you're irrationally insisting that the absence of God is a given, which seems questionable. You're just stipulating it and I'm pretty sure that's unwarranted.
When Christian philosophy starts reaching towards "but is suffering and dog-eat-dog actually evil?"
No, we do think those things are evil. The question is why you do when so many others disagree.
And the answer is that the whole mindset you have toward the question is rooted in Christian metaphysics. You can't even see it any other way. However, having absorbed some of that but not the rest, you're playing with half a deck as it were and not making any sense.
TitaniumButterfly
18d ago
So why do you think that within any given country more conservative people reproduce more?
There's a difference between identifying as religious and actually practicing a religion, and conservative people are more likely to do the latter.
TitaniumButterfly
18d ago
As the father of many children, making my living in the Bay Area, I can only say that there almost isn't any such thing as making enough money to have lots of kids here. We make it work because my wife's mom is of an old breed which believes in helping with the grandkids as much as possible. Meanwhile my mom is enough of a normal boomer that while she enjoys the idea of helping she doesn't actually want to do so in most scenarios. I'm sending my older kids to a parochial school while we continue to make babies but the plan is to transition everyone to homeschool once it becomes temporally feasible.
The point is that I'm a fan of the nuclear family, but to actually be functional it requires one parent (the mom) to be home most of the time and/or seriously-committed grandparents. Putting grandparents in the same house seems like overkill to me but maybe we could just make more of an effort to live near family?
TitaniumButterfly
18d ago
I may be completely misinterpreting your post but it seems to me that the tariffs are clearly intended to be temporary bargaining chips. Long-term consequences are not expected.
TitaniumButterfly
19d ago
Even so I can easily see it pushing a lot of people from "Let them die" to "Kill them preemptively." And if that sounds extreme consider that it's the default position in a lot of places.
TitaniumButterfly
19d ago
That's not even remotely what we were trying to do in Afghanistan.
Random accusations toward Jews seem to have become commonplace enough that I just sorta started screening them out. So what occurred to me as odd here is the idea that any organization with that sort of capacity would be so bothered with the UK. Pretty sure it's at the point where you could just leave it alone for a couple/few more decades then come back and declare victory.
My biases would have been much better-flattered by a tenuous insistence that this is some sort of Chinese plot.
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