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popocatepetl


				

				

				
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joined 2022 September 04 22:26:05 UTC

I'm the guy who edits every comment I write at least four times. Sorry.


				

User ID: 215

popocatepetl


				
				
				

				
2 followers   follows 1 user   joined 2022 September 04 22:26:05 UTC

					

I'm the guy who edits every comment I write at least four times. Sorry.


					

User ID: 215

There aren't that many interesting regular season narratives this year. "Will Aaron Rodgers succeed with the Jets?" "The Bengals are a dumpster fire despite Joe Burrow." Most of the rest I can think of are playoff specifics. (eg "Can the Bills/Ravens stop choking?")

My gut says this a growing problem. With expanded playoffs, every high Q-rating quarterback will almost certainly get into the dance. This leaves the regular season feeling a bit like a formality.

Modernist entryists or Nietzschean reactionaries have an equal tendency to quote scripture out of context and not holistically. Let me suggest gently that you do not know scripture as well as Thomas Aquinas, other doctors of the church, or the great theologians of the middle ages. I am sure that if radical self-mutilation becomes a trend in the year 2500, similar people will be quoting Matthew 5:30 and saying Christians are being inconsistent for not cutting their hands off.

As for these specific errors, the meaning of Matthew 8:21-22 is that God comes before family in the order of charity (this is a part of Christian virtue theology I did not mention because it was irrelevant to the point at hand).

Luke 18:18-23 was a rich young man called to a vocation in the priesthood, but he rejected the call because of earthly attachment. Jesus does not demand self-penury of many other people who ask for salvation in the gospels; it was particular to the rich young man's circumstances. Every soul has need of its own mortifications. Some of Jesus's closest friends feast, drink wine, and anoint with three hundred denarii oils. To address your specific point, the "poor" in this instance that the rich young man would give to are members of his tribal ingroup; his family is ostensibly already well taken care of, thus obeying the order of charity.

You're discussing early in his ministry (Matthew 10:5-6). Later on Jesus has no problem healing Gentiles (e.g. Matthew 15) and ultimately he sent the disciples out to Save literally everyone (Matthew 28:19-20):

Yes, this is exactly my point. He went first to his in-group, and then to all nations. When a member of the out-group appeared in need before him (immediate neighbor), he ministered to them. But he observed the order of charity. In parable, first the Lord invites his family and friends to the wedding banquet, and when they refuse, he goes into the streets to summon others.

Any moral system that insists you have some obligation to black crack babies across the country is trivially extendible to cover unfortunates all across the world and I suspect there's cognitive dissonance in not doing so.

That moral system is called Christianity. Precious few have any problem tolerating the cognitive dissonance

Traditionally Christianity has taught an order of charity, expounded most famously by St. Aquinas, formulated by synthesizing the teachings of the epistles. To cut through the scholasticism talk, it went something like: immediate family, immediate neighbors, extended family, coreligionists and countrymen, distant neighbors (eg people in Malawi), and then enemies.

The modern progressive version of "all biomass is equally loved by God, buy mosquito nets for Ndugu rather than a toy for Johnny" is not eternally the Christian moral system, but something that appeared rather recently.

If a progressive Christian comes at you with the Good Samaritan, ask them why Jesus sent out the twelve telling them to not to go among the Gentiles or enter Samaritan towns.

So are you saying all subjective categories are self-referential? "Republicans are people who vote for other Republicans" and such?

That is a volitional category, not a subjective category. With volitional categories you can give the appearance of circularity with statements like "Christians are those who believe in Christianity" or "Military families are families where a father/mother has enlisted in the military." This superficial circularity is resolved by defining the second term. "Christians are those who believe Jesus of Nazarath (0-33 AD) was the son of God and his teachings result in eternal life for those who follow them." "Military families are families where a father/mother receives a salary from the government to train in the use of weapons and fight in the event of war."

This cannot be done with "A female is someone who wants to be treated as a female". Even if female is understood to be volitional, the second term goes undefined.

I think we can both agree that gender does exist as something independent of sex?

With the exception of grammar? No. If gender is not sex, it is incumbent on gender theorists to provide a non-circular definition.

"External gender" is your term for "gender roles", which can be defined as the manners and expectations society has for the male/female biological sex. If you want to say "gender roles should be abolished", you have a coherent position. But trans advocates do not (usually) want this; they want the gender roles to remain even as they deny female/male (the real, definable concepts) as meaningful categories.

I'm waiting for a non-self-referential definition of gender

External Gender: People perceived as "female" get treated differently

Internal Gender: I prefer being called "ma'am", and am happier when my external gender is "female".

This is self-referential. "The meaning of female gender is treating a person like a female, and a person who is of female gender is one who wants to be treated like a female."

the main appeal is texture

This is the key. In some East Asian cuisine, while the flavor matters it's just one dimension. (Interesting substack. TW descriptions of disgusting food.)

I'm curious if anyone has any other opinions.

It's nonsense. The LLM did a good job identifying the concepts and vocabulary people use when trying to say something profound about reality, whether or not they have anything substantive to say. (Which it doesn't.)

Though the lens of US politics: In recent days the Biden admin has been pushing hard for a Gaza ceasefire. (My interpretation sees this as part of the fresh burst to win the 2024 election now that Biden has withdrawn.) Does this keep Israel-Palestine a live issue through election day?

Wild take: Right-wingers don't dislike Kamala.

Not wild. I'm as opposed to DEI and representationalism as anyone. Here's (what I'll try to make) an unvarnished report of my feelings.

I feel no animosity towards her. From the catbird seat, she will doubtless say things to make me dislike her in the future. But for now, I see her as a minority actress who was chosen to play the wife of an rich white guy in an insurance ad, except instead of playing wife she was playing vice president, and the rich white guy wasn't her husband but Joe Biden.

My animosity is for the people who put her there, both on the supply and demand end. That animosity is fairly strong, more or less whenever I see a BIPOC/gender-nonconforming minority in a leadership position now.

"woe to him who has the full backing of the board—he is a dead man walking.”

It's the same with starting quarterbacks. By the time a head coach has to answer questions about benching them, it's over.

"Trust arrives walking and departs riding."

The political value of maintaining moral high ground here does not pay the cost of letting your opponents keep a chilling effect superweapon for their exclusive use. Do I want rando home depot employees fired for venting political frustrations on Facebook? No. But given conservatives are laboring under a system where they often can't be caught misgendering someone online, letting democrats do a "haha just kidding... unless?" routine for political assassinations is insane.

Yes, that would be entirely legal. (Though difficult to imagine in practice, because a large part of the GOP is still legacy republicans). What Vance suggested, though, was "when the courts stop you, stand before the country, and say 'The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.'"

Why wouldn’t this work?

I do not believe TPTB will allow the populists to win through the normal methods. This is just a prior, not a position I have proof of, besides observing Lucy pull away the football on many occasions. If the above program were seriously approaching accomplishment through legal methods, the establishment would throw a coup of their own.

By this standard Biden has couped too. The border and student loans would both be considered illegal actions.

As I understand it, Biden accomplished these by slithering through legal loopholes, not disobeying the courts. When the Supreme Court overturned student loan forgiveness, the Biden team did not say "Screw you, Clarence Thomas, let's see you stop us" and strike the ledgers anyway; they set lawyers to find every technicality on the books. Same with opening the borders.

Of course, I am not implying moral superiority on the Biden side. Merely that, as Scott wrote about populism vs. the deep state in Turkey:

"The populace can genuinely seize the reins of a democracy if it really wants. But if that happens, the government will be arrayed against every other institution in the nation. Elites naturally rise to the top of everything - media, academia, culture - so all of those institutions will hate the new government and be hated by it in turn. Since all natural organic processes favor elites, if the government wants to win, it will have to destroy everything natural and organic"

Coups are necessary for anti-establishment side of a populist vs. establishment showdown. The establishment side can just let the systems run and get their way.

If you intentionally break the law by firing bureaucrats on partisan grounds

I would think that the plan would be to fire them based on lack of merit?

In his own words, "fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people", to "seize the institutions of the left" as a "de-Baathification program, a de-woke-ification program".

He's not saying to fire bad bureaucrats or incompetent DEI hires; he's saying to fire democrats.

I don't understand this. We had this system for nearly two hundred years and nobody called it a coup when the old guy's people got cleaned out and the new guy's people got installed.

And then we passed civil service reform acts, which are still on the books. If you intentionally break the law by firing bureaucrats on partisan grounds, and then ignore the courts ordering you to reinstate them, you have made an illegal power grab and set the constitution aside. In my mind this can reasonably be called a coup.

His segments were largely about dishonest media, cancel culture, GOP politicians betraying their base, and the administrative deepstate. You can call this "carrying water for Trump" because the people who vote for Trump also complain about these things. To me, it was "accurate political commentary".

Just a reminder that Tucker Carlson is a proven liar and despised trump during his presidency.

Yes, this is what Reddit said about that. But I don't recall any Tucker segments from around then where he lavishly praised Trump? I consider Trump a narcissist and mostly a fool, and I thought his presidential term was horribly ineffective. Nevertheless, I agreed with Tucker segments at the time. I understand that many progressives learn third-hand that Tucker Carlson Tonight was the "Praise God-Emperor Trump Show", but was there actual lying here or just a clickbait insinuation of it?

I've been looking into this guy. Peg me as shocked that, if only superficially, neoreactionary thought has penetrated the highest levels of GOP politics. Vance cites Curtis Yarvin as one of his influences and follows BronzeAgePervert and Steve Sailer on X. He advocated for dismantling the federal bureaucracy and ignoring legal challenges to it in a 2022 Vanity Fair interview — which they correctly characterize as a coup.

All this feels like nothing more than watching 2012 Tumblr ideas leap into the Democratic platform overnight. Whether Vance's NRx ideas are sincerely held or not, it's fascinating. As an NRx favorite, Mosca, said:

In reality the dominion of an organized minority, obeying a single impulse, over the unorganized majority is inevitable. The power of any minority is irresistible as against each single individual in the majority, who stands alone before the totality of the organized minority. A hundred men acting uniformly in concert, with a common understanding, will triumph over a thousand men who are not in accord and can therefore be dealt with one by one.

So a tiny gaggle of too-online neoreactionaries triumph and take command of MAGA, quite ignoring the mass of tens of millions of boomer normiecons.

I agree that normies love stability. the problem is a bland democrat is the same is a bland republican.

Can the GOP front a bland republican? It seems to me the Democrats are fairly successful at channeling their radical wing's energy into bland-seeming manager politicians. By contrast, the MAGA wing will veto non-MAGA candidates, who in turn spook the normies; this is to my eyes what happened in 2022 with the red wave that never materialized.

The core difference is that, for all of BLM and antifa's blustering about the revolution, the American red tribe is a whole lot angrier about the state of politics. Psmith is only somewhat exaggerating here when he says 100% of the revolutionary energy in our own society is on the right today. Blue tribe meanwhile knows it's playing defense.

Just this week in the UK, the MAGA equivalent in Britain blew up 14 years of Conservative rule to vote for the radical populist Reform, allowing Labour to waltz into power with a laughable third of the vote. This is what I expect in the US if 2028 Republicans try to field a Nikki Haley or Mitt Romney-like.

What were the actual sharings-in-bad-faith or misrepresentations that he was worried about?

He never offered any explanation to my best research. About a year ago he updated the first essay with "I beg you to read anything else I've written other than this piece. I beg you", followed by deletion in December.

or mildly competent bureaucrats in boring constituencies without major insanity. This last category is a GOOD category that the dems have, but theyre not gonna be winners.

Are you confident of this? I don't think Biden won in 2020 due to personal magnetism. At least until the boomers die, any politician that goes on the stage and says "I will be boring and keep the status quo, I'm not scary, no sirree" can siphon of votes from otherwise culturally conservative aging population — enough to win elections at least.

Even if boomers don't like guatemalans or transkids, the ones I know all have clay feet and spook at any politician seriously threatening to reshuffle the established order. They're winding out the clock on their comfortable retirements, after all. Consider that the democrats are still 40% likely to win according on betting markets, despite the last four years and their presenting an optically horrible candidate.

Are those Archive links he links to in his Substack faithful to his original postings?

Unless he's in cahoots with archive.org, they must be. And the content doesn't seem different from what I remember.

I guess he should be applauded for giving a link, at least, even if he refuses to put the arguments under his own name for some reason.

The worst case was him deleting his most popular substacks, "Please Just Fucking Tell Me What Term I Am Allowed to Use for the Sweeping Social and Political Changes You Demand" and "Of Course You Know What 'Woke' Means", because conservatives found his arguments good and started linking them. He seems afraid to be seen building bridges with non-fellow travelers, even when their interests and beliefs align with the old-style left perfectly.

One result that jumps out is single women over age 40 are not very interested in dating (71-29 against dating). In the 18-39 age range the interest is pretty comparable across sex. 67% of single men and 61% of single women are interested in dating.

I suspect this, like the bitter comments of venerable ladies above, is rationalized hopelessness. "It's impossible to get what I want, so I don't want it." In young men this manifests as MGTOW.

So does the average expert, apparently

No, because the "experts" are left wing, and "fascists" are right wing. "Socially conservative/fiscally liberal" is the fascist quadrant, "socially liberal/fiscally liberal" is the progressive quadrant.

You seem to be operating from a bizarre definition of fascism. "All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state" certainly reflects the views of the expert class more than those of the maga hat wearing normie republican, as do the fascists' many vigorous attempts at social engineering and geopolitical aggression.

To be clear, I do not think "the experts" are meaningfully fascist. There has been a concerted attempt by all politically sides to liken their enemies to fascists, which has lead to the word being a largely useless tangle of negative mental associations.