TitaniumButterfly
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User ID: 2854
TitaniumButterfly
17hr 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?
TitaniumButterfly
19hr 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.
TitaniumButterfly
19hr ago
Yes.
TitaniumButterfly
21hr ago
They could stop
TitaniumButterfly
4d ago
I believe he's referring to 1967, not the Summer of Floyd.
TitaniumButterfly
4d 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.
TitaniumButterfly
4d 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.
TitaniumButterfly
4d 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.
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.
https://x.com/lara_e_brown/status/1909607333090513144
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.
TitaniumButterfly
6d ago
Also, it calls LotR a 'trilogy'. Who is going to be pedantic about such things if not MENSA?
TitaniumButterfly
6d ago
What does Trump have to do with this?
TitaniumButterfly
7d 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.’
The existence of God is one of the least “directional” questions we can consider.
I don't think so. Orthodox Christian theology indicates that God does not exist in any sense that we could comprehend as existence. To say that God exists would be considered inaccurate, as the notion of 'existence' we're (capable of) using does not apply here. But it would also be wrong to say that God does not exist, as our idea of that is wrong too. God is beyond existence and nonexistence.
What people want from God is immortality. They want a guarantee that biological death is not the end. My immortal soul will either ascend to paradise upon my death (or I will experience bodily resurrection at some point in the future etc, whatever your preferred theology is), or it won’t. That makes a big difference in terms of what I can expect to directly experience in the future. Being “directionally correct” is cold comfort if you don’t get the actual immortality along with it.
How do you explain pre-Christian Judaism, in which major schools of thought denied an afterlife and most of the major ones said 'idk' at best? Personally, while I like my (wrong) notions of what eternal existence will be, I'm much more concerned about what we might call ultimate consequence. Meaning, if you will. I don't need personal eternal existence to live a meaningful life.
Or, you know, any pagan religion which doesn't posit an afterlife, or indicates that the afterlife is fairly uniformly terrible.
Being “directionally correct” is cold comfort if you don’t get the actual immortality along with it.
I'd take being sure of that in a heartbeat.
The retreat from viewing eternal life and eternal damnation as very concrete, tangible, and urgent matters is yet another symptom of religion continuing to cede ground to materialism and atheism.
This narrative just doesn't ring true to me at all, not least for the reasons above.
To this comment I'll append some words by Fr. Thomas Hopko of blessed memory.
TitaniumButterfly
11d ago
I'm a minarchist, with the caveat that I think there's an optimal size and scope for governments (and little evidence that we're already there).
Gotta say I'm interested in talking to a minarchist who isn't sure our government is big enough yet! Although come to think of it maybe that describes the non-anarchist left in general?
TitaniumButterfly
13d ago
Yeah, I did enjoy Haibane Renmei and Gankutsuo though the latter's ending was pretty disappointing. GTO was a lot of fun when I watched it 20 years ago. Maybe time to do that again!
TitaniumButterfly
14d ago
Too old now.
TitaniumButterfly
14d ago
Conclusion does not follow from premise here. That's still consistent with most people being able to tell most of the time.
I really like that 80s/90s vibe. Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Eva, Jin Roh, Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honneamise, Trigun, Bebop, and so on. That era's animation and vision of the future just hits right.
LOGH is GOAT but there's really nothing else like it.
A more modern anime that landed well for me was Blame! though I think it could have been better.
Thanks, yeah. Think I did try Kino's Journey and may again.
Mononoke (2007, 12-episode anime). The Medicine Seller must track down the cause and drive of various supernatural ailments, though this often focuses more on the moral failings and limits of the humans he's working to protect.
Based on the description I thought you meant Mushishi but apparently this is a thing too. May give it a shot.
TitaniumButterfly
15d ago
Can you recommend any? I've been trying to get into classic anime lately (with all my spare time haha) but it's a minefield at best. Mostly trash or weird problems like when someone tells me to watch a series and it sucks and then they're like no not THAT version!
Incidentally the auto-subs on Crunchyroll's version of Berserk (i.e. the bad one) are hilariously awful. Often incomprehensible, always late, names are inconsistent, and at one point a horse demon is licking an uptight bound and topless blonde (just to scare her I guess) and then, per the subs, shouts 'EMAIL ME!' right as Gods or Guts or Gertzu decapitates him with the giant sword.
TitaniumButterfly
15d ago
I find this whole conversation and the intensity of your passion bizarre, but okay.
Setting aside the indisputable fact that you have no idea whether he 'conducted' 'positive action', it remains the case that even you don't claim he's ever said that someone should intentionally broadcast the matter afterward. That would obviously be crazy. After reading your post multiple times it's still not clear to me what inconsistency you're trying to catch him in. What is clear to me is that there's some kind of unseemly antipathy here. At any rate I'm checking out of the conversation and will not be responding further.
Did he meet his own standard of sincerity and moral courage that he accused other of lacking if they did not join a violent resistance despite risk of bodily harm as a consequence?
By way of reply, if I knew the answer, and that answer were yes, do you think I'd talk about it?
Kulak can be accused of many things but I haven't yet caught him in moral inconsistency.
TitaniumButterfly
15d ago
Why would I be interested in changing your mind about this? I have no idea who you are and it's a personal matter. Sticking up for a friend is all.
TitaniumButterfly
15d ago
A whole lot and yeah I guess you could say something like that. Not Motte meetups per se but extremely heavy overlap.
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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