Bartender_Venator
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User ID: 2349
Bartender_Venator
12hr ago
Really crazy. You'd think that Christians would think about what a just war is, compared to an unjust war, and come up with some kind of, uh, theory about it.
Bartender_Venator
12hr ago
I wrote an edit about the difference between euthanizing someone and taking them off life support, but you may not have seen it. Incidentally, this is another issue that Christians have thought much harder about than people on the internet just kind of assume they have, cf. the Catholic doctrine of double effect and palliative care.
I will leave it to the Christian posters here to elaborate on how they see things, since I may get the exact points of their beliefs wrong (my personal answer would be, no, that's not how most Christians think, but also yeschad.jpg, women's (and men's) sexuality should be controlled by social norms and, to the extent practicable, the State). The guy you are making up in your head to get mad at certainly does exist, among Christians, atheists, Muslims, etc., but isn't particularly relevant to this discussion. What I understand Christians believe is that all human life is inherently valuable, as one of the highest gifts God gave us, and there are only a certain quite limited set of (almost entirely military/judicial) circumstances in which it is just to take a life. Their moral repugnance of murder is not just "it sucks for the guy who got murdered because it hurts a lot and he didn't want to be murdered", but that it is the snuffing out of something inherently extraordinarily valuable. Things get complicated around the natural end of life, but the suffering our bodies inflict on us is also considered to be a part of life, one that we endure because it in some way brings us closer to higher things. Generally, a good prior is that the group that's had the West's smartest minds thinking about things in their paradigm for almost two thousand years probably has a more developed theory of any given issue than something you heard about their beliefs from Jon Stewart or a social media dunk.
I'm aware that Christians tend to not particularly like those either, if prompted, but there does not seem to be that much of an organised opposition
Bruh the UK Parliament just voted down an assisted dying bill that had been on the docket for two years with strong establishment and media support, after the bill had already been passed once by the House of Commons. I assume it was the Hare Krishnas fighting that campaign? I also fail to see the connection between euthanizing brain-damaged toddlers and whatever narrative you have about sex here, to the point where accusing others of a fixation on sex sounds awfully like projection. In the pro-life article linked there, there's not a single sentence about sex or sexuality, just a (surprisingly) matter-of-fact reporting of the law and the condition of the child (your problem seems to be that "the focus is instead squarely on the adults making the decision" - I suppose, in theory, they could have asked the now-deceased brain-damaged two-year-old for his/her opinion, but that seems difficult for multiple reasons).
Edit: I was going to make this point in another comment, but looking at the opening of yours I may as well make it here: it seems to me that a really obvious schelling point here is the difference between "pulling the plug"/moving to palliative care and actively killing someone. Obvious and natural place to put a fence on the slippery slope. For adults, I'd say let them fill out a form to get discharged from hospital with a bottle of Scotch and a pistol, but I have a feeling that might get abused by certain segments of the population.
Bartender_Venator
16hr ago
From my limited experience with rave culture, I agree with you on the vibes. Makes me wish I'd gotten into it in my 20s. Unsurprisingly in retrospect, the scene I wrote off as braindead is super chill, and the indie music scene I gravitated towards as cultured and intellectual attracts utterly rancid people.
Bartender_Venator
16hr ago
Very interesting! I have not actually read The Problem of China, I'm going off memories of Skeptical Essays, which was much more inclined to make throwaway rhetorical comparisons of enlightened China against the brutish West.
Bartender_Venator
18hr ago
There's got to be a further Oedipus link we could make to the idea of removing one's optic gland...
There's this "historical evidence on Sparta was largely written down by Sparta's political opponents" factoid that I recall of note.
I would disagree with this, personally. The historical evidence we have on Sparta was largely written by foreigners in opposing or post-Spartan states, yes, but very often by foreigners who sympathized with Sparta for domestic political or philosophic reasons - as sympathizers of the aristocratic elite, Spartan 'virtuous oligarchy' appealed to them as contrast to Athenian democracy. Xenophon, who wrote The Constitution of the Lacedemonians, even defected to Sparta rather than return to Athens. A more accurate parallel would be somewhere between Tacitus' Germania and the tendency of Enlightenment-influenced writers to idealize Chinese government (I recall Bertrand Russell still gushing over China's rational and virtuous political system in the 1920s...).
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
Yeah I think if you're willing to interpret the rest of Genesis metaphorically, there's nothing really stopping you from interpreting the Garden of Eden as the pre-agricultural state of Man, and the 'knowledge of Good and Evil' as the spiritual/cultural prerequisite for the creation of agricultural society.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
Oh that's another great candidate - harder to sing than the others, though, you need a bit of wind in the pipes.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
I always find it funny that God Save The King/Queen is generally panned as a national anthem in Britain, compared to Jerusalem, Rule Britannia, or even Swing Low, Sweet Chariot (for the rugby fans), but the Germans managed to remix it into an absolute banger
Bartender_Venator
2d ago
The blue-lined octopus link really makes me wonder how fucked-up the Octopodes' romance novels would be. What I really wonder, though, is how even an advanced technological society would deal with caring for thousands of plankton-sized infants drifting on the currents until they eat enough or get eaten. There would presumably be Octopode religious sects and Octo-EAs obsessing over how to get birthing nets out there, and Octopode Ehrlichs predicting terrible doom if they were to succeed and increase the population a thousandfold in a generation.
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
Forget it, Jake, it's Oak Lawn.
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
Ah, then you probably know far more than me. I always took an interest in the social dynamics of the South Side, but very much as an occasional outsider. Though I did go to Bridgeport cop bars fairly often during covid, because the cop bars stayed open.
So, Oak Lawn is a sleepy, middle-class/lower-middle-class neighbourhood, the sort of place that to this day has a shopping mall, a hooters, and motels. It's right on the edge between what you can call Chicago and what you would call the burbs, and also right on the edge between the black and white South Sides (it's getting more Hispanic, hence my tinder girl, but only in recent decades). Heavily white ethnic in a way that would mean his family wouldn't be particularly out of place there. You're technically in the city, but it's about an hour to get downtown, there's nothing but the ruins of the South Side between you on 97th St and Chinatown on 22nd St, and the tony northern neighbourhoods where the rich kids grow up might as well be a world away. You're raised with middle-class aspirations, but exposed to both black urban dysfunction and the anomie of the burbs (and whatever awful stuff was going on in Hanania's family, that's not something I can psychoanalyze). His educational track also fits for a local boy done good - local community college, then a nice but unremarkable state university, then back in triumph for UChicago Law, the Chicago flagship university both half an hour and an immeasurable distance from home. I don't know Hanania, but I've known many people like this, who grew up on the outside looking in, and finally made it in, but never get over growing up so close to and yet so far away from their aspirations. The wignat stuff is what makes me pretty comfortable in this reading; I wouldn't base it just on his current writing and my knowledge of the area, but that sort of proof of deep alienation, radical desire, and emphasis on race (i.e. fervent hatred of the crappier neighbourhoods next door) offers a pretty good signal of what might be going on in his turn from race war to class war.
Bartender_Venator
4d ago
I used to hook up with a Latina tattoo artist who lived in the neighbourhood Hanania grew up in. Fifteen minutes of driving from the freeway to her house and back were enough to realize why it would give a fellow permanently crippling class anxiety.
Bartender_Venator
4d ago
There is a bizarre meme going around the segment of the right that still listens to libertarians that in fact, the left are entirely correct about the chuds' motivations for voting, and the sole reason why the American right-wing voter supports capitalism is because they're too racist to spend money on black people. I assume libertarians took on the talking point because it's so detached from actual people that only a highly educated person could possibly believe it ("nonsense is a uniform", as they say), and therefore signals some kind of status in their world - plus that there are few higher aspirations for a libertarian than to find a galaxy-brained way to agree with the left. But it's obviously not true, and is based on a facile reading of studies about the relationship between diversity and the breakdown of social solidary that doesn't survive a moment's contact with empirical reality. No, white Americans did not choose economic liberty as a principle of government because doing so denied gibs to black people. Nobody seriously believes any of this, it's just a Hot Take.
Bartender_Venator
4d ago
City people are notoriously authoritarian more or less out of necessity
Have you, uh, been downtown in a US city in the past ten years?
Bartender_Venator
4d ago
"Trump is a Russian asset" is a 'borderline conspiracy theory'
Ok man, take your hands off the keyboard. Take a deep breath, in and out, in and out. Now go into the bathroom, and look in the mirror. Repeat those words to yourself, out loud, looking in your own eyes. Try to keep a straight face - no giggling, no shamefaced grimace. Can you do it? If so, I'm impressed, that's some serious dedication to the bit.
Bartender_Venator
4d ago
ok, that makes more sense then
Bartender_Venator
4d ago
I am a notable fan of Napoleon III on balance for his impressive domestic accomplishments, but his foreign policy pretty uniformly blew up in his face - even the unification of Italy just bogged him down in the Papal question.
Bartender_Venator
4d ago
He's engaging in siege-warfare egotistical excesses? Or are you referring to Demetrius Poliorketes?
Bartender_Venator
4d ago
Technically, I think the non-consecutive terms make him both brothers.
Bartender_Venator
4d ago
Although I'll note that Henry VIII's wars are one of the least remembered things about him, compared to his personal life, religious policy, or even diplomacy (Field of the Cloth of Gold). All that money culminated in... burning down Edinburgh, occupying Boulogne for six years, and selling that town back to the French. Almost as much of a waste of money as the Great Society.
Bartender_Venator
4d ago
Before Covid I went to a couple meetups just to try and meet people in DC who weren't working in politics, and my experience was that the right move on meetups is to go to ones for hobbies that well-adjusted people do, but where they need a meetup to find fellow hobbyists. Recall the writers' meetups being particularly good.
You complained about the death penalty and war, not the specifics of the current war in Iran, and I answered that. I don't particularly care whether or not you feel any given current thing act of war fits just war theory or not, I'm pointing out that Christians have a perfectly good answer to the questions of war and, of course, the death penalty. The "what would 'Ancient Christians' (do you mean the Apostles? The Church Fathers? Constantine?) think" thing is pretty much incoherent, because formalized just war theory was Medieval rather than Roman - look how vague the theory from Ambrose is in the wikipedia article you're quoting. My suspicion, though, is that they would be significantly closer to "this is the coolest thing ever, bold Christian knights flew o'er the Ocean to capture a God-hating rebel, and annihilated a heathen prince with bolts from the sky!"
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