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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   1772 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 22, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Does anyone know what happened to the My Posting Career forum?

Do you think that Silmarillion will ever be put to screen? It is just too depressing with few bright spots.

There was a window for “serious fantasy” adaptation around the peak of Game of Thrones. I could see one of the more contained stories, Beren and Luthien or even Túrin Turambar, working in that context.

You can’t get too mythic, or you’ll lose people. See Marvel vs. DC films. But you also can’t inject human elven interest, because it will subsume the setting into thin plots. See everything about Rings of Power. So parts I, II and IV are out. I’d argue against doing the War of Wrath for the same reasons. It’s amazing in the source material as a culmination of this centuries-long slide into oblivion. Without that setup, it’s pure dei ex machina.

A lot of the other stories only work as part of that arc. The characters are static and situations are largely out of their control. I could see a miniseries or similar capturing the various political disasters, building up to Nirnaeth Arnoediad, but man. Talk about a rough place to end it.

The mûmak in the room is, of course, Fëanor. He’s got some of the best character notes, but that’s not enough to make a character arc. He sets so much in motion, but without room for the payoff, it’d fall flat. Maybe he’d work as a force of nature, silhouetted in the opening credits and otherwise avoided? The Dark Souls opening cutscene, so to speak? I can’t think of a good comparison in TV.

Anyway. I suggested the best options were Túrin and Luthien. The former works as a self-contained tragedy. It’s got great setpieces, actual character development, and the lurid and very human disasters so popular in prestige TV. I think it’d still work, even if the market for grim stories has subsided a bit.

Beren and Luthien are pretty different. They’re more fleshed out than most Silmarillion characters, and have enough plot beats for an actual movie. But the setpieces are kind of underwhelming—could one portray dancing Morgoth to sleep without causing eye-rolls? I could see this one working only as a painfully unironic portrayal. Something on par with the Jackson movies, where excellent production and casting lets people suspend disbelief. A well-executed love story consistently sells well. However…I’m not sure such an angle would be chosen today. The urge to Subvert Expectations is still incredibly strong.

I miss @FarNearEverywhere.

Depressing is not that big of a deal, a lot of genres (horror, noir, catastrophe, etc.) aren't exactly sunshine and puppies. It's just that the source material is sometimes a bit dry for general audience, and the fun parts aren't often spelled out but only implied, so the movie script needs to add a lot of things that make it a movie attractive to a modern audience. And this needs to be done very tastefully because the original is not of that nature at all. And "tastefully" does not seem to be something the people in (extended) Hollywood are capable of doing. Thus, abominations like ROP are born. Is it possible in theory? I think it might be. But it requires a lot of skill and love and integrity, and I don't expect somebody with all these qualities to be able to pass through the gatekeepers of Hollywood and be able to actually execute such project.

In animated form, maybe. Not live action. Too niche. Should've been part of the Peter Jackson-era if attempted. And Hollywood has regressed too much to pull it off now.

It's too disjointed a narrative to work as one story (either on film or on tv), but I could see movies or series being made out of particular vignettes that are loosely connected. I could definitely see adaptations of the stories of Beren and Luthien, Turin Turambar, Earendil and the War of Wrath, etc. at some point down the road.

Beren amd Luthien is the only story in the Silmarillion with enough meat on its bones to really fill out a movie or tv show script. That, combined with the obvious through-line to Aragorn and Arwen and the fact that it's the only Silmarillion sub-story with 4-quadrant appeal, means it's by far the most likely to get an adaptation any time soon.

An adaption is possible, but many people, especially Tolkien fans, won't like it.

It's possible, since Christopher Tolkien died. It's not clear to me that whoever manages the estate now (his children, I guess) will be as protective of the legacy as he was. I think it's kinda hard to adapt because there isn't a real character through-line, but Hollywood might invent something there.

That said I have no interest in seeing it happen. LOTR was already the best case scenario we're likely to see, and I thought the movies had egregious problems as adaptations of Tolkien (though they were great movies on their own merits). The Hobbit movies were straight up bad movies (let alone being good adaptations), and from everything I've read about Rings of Power it's laughably bad. I doubt that a Silmarillion adaptation would fare better, and as it's my favorite book of all time I have no real desire to watch that train wreck.

LOTR was already the best case scenario we're likely to see, and I thought the movies had egregious problems as adaptations of Tolkien

I remember thinking with each movie that the problem was never stuff that was left out but the completely and utterly pointless Hollywoodisms that were added. I can only guess how bad job a modern production would do, particularly with source material that doesn't spell as many things out.

Yeah, that was basically my complaint as well. For all the attention that got paid to Tom Bombadil, I thought it was perfectly reasonable to cut him. It was when Jackson and Walsh went "we need to add more conflict and play up the Ring" that things really left a sour taste in my mouth. I do think that the Scouring of the Shire should've been included, though. It is the capstone on all the Hobbits' character arcs, and not having it at all was a big misstep. Perhaps leave it for the Extended Edition, but you gotta have it in some form.

My line of thought was that is mostly a tragedy. It is just 400 pages of the elves getting their asses handed to them (not entirely without their own cooperation in that)

How do you use voting systems on social media/fora? (likes, upvotes/downvotes, etc.)

Personally, I almost only upvote/like posts when I'm sorting by newest - as that's when my upvote has the most marginal value to promote a post - and I virtually never downvote/dislike. Past the point where my individual vote has substantial value to the algorithm, I simply don't care to leave my petty display of opinion. For those of you who do use your votes, here are some questions to reflect upon:

  • Are you selective with your votes or do you vote on most/all posts you see?
  • Do you find yourself upvoting people you disagree with due to the quality of their argument, or vice versa?
  • Do you downvote people you're arguing with or do you leave judgement entirely to the masses?
  • Do you remove the auto self-upvote on your posts/comments?

I've never been a real heavy voter, I write a lot more than I vote, and I don't write as much as some. I suppose I feel like I don't enjoy the process of considering "does this comment deserve an upvote or not, does it deserve it more or less than some other comment", and such things. I probably do less than a dozen votes a month I guess. I kind of suspect there's a lot of heavy voters who write little to nothing as well.

I tend to upvote things that really stand out enough to think, I'm glad somebody made that point. Sometimes I upvote things that I think got beat up too hard or aren't popular enough to get a lot of upvotes due to the actual position being argued being not that well liked here. I don't really downvote much, even if I'm disagreeing with somebody, unless what they're saying is really over the top low-quality, though that often gets modded too.

I'd more tend to leave judgement to the masses in any argument I'm in. That's whose sake I'm really arguing for anyways. Getting at least some votes either way is a nice sign that somebody is at least seeing the discussion. I tend more to just not continue if I think the discussion is too low-quality to bother and nobody is watching rather than throw a bunch of downvotes around. Or of course if we end up basically agreeing and it doesn't feel like there's more worth saying.

Are you selective with your votes or do you vote on most/all posts you see?

I'm selective, about 1 post a day get a vote from me each day, except answers to my comments (I tend to vote these more systematically except for the situation I'll explain on the 3rd question)

Do you find yourself upvoting people you disagree with due to the quality of their argument, or vice versa?

Yes. I routinely upvote posts I disagree with because they were well argued, and downvote posts I agree when I feel the poster argued it poorly or in an unproductive way.

Do you downvote people you're arguing with or do you leave judgement entirely to the masses?

Depends on whether I feel my reaction is emotional or not. If I feel like my negative opinion of the post is due to defensiveness about my position, I try not to vote (or I upvote to reward engagement).

Do you remove the auto self-upvote on your posts/comments?

No, does anyone do that? I mentally account for it on my posts.

I'm speaking regarding this site, where there is no algorithm to have to think about:

Generally, I upvote things that I think are good. I downvote things that I think are bad. Many things I don't vote either way on. Having good insights is one of the most common factors behind me thinking it's good.

Occasionally, if I get to something that's been around for long enough to see the results, I'll upvote someone who's been net-downvoted if it doesn't feel like their comment warranted the votes to be as negative as they are.

If I'm in a one-on-one conversation a few levels deep, I think I upvote people sometimes, because it's nice of them to keep engaging with me. I honestly can't recall how often I downvote people when I'm in the midst of an argument with them—I think I'm more likely to do so if it's unnecessarily bad, instead of merely disagreement. I only remove the auto-upvote if I retroactively think what I said wasn't actually very good.

I use the upvote as a "more of this, please" button and the downvote as a "less of this, please" button. The extent to which this correlates with agree/disagree vs well-reasoned/poorly reasoned probably varies with my mood, though I hope it tends to be the latter more often than the former.

I also try to be a little extra charitable with anyone who tends to buck the zeitgeist of whichever community I'm in, both as a check against my own biases and out of a desire to maintain what intellectual diversity we have left.

I upvote things that I enjoyed reading for the quality of the argument they contributed, and downvote things that I don't think contributed anything. I try to do so independently of agreement/disagreement, but if I'm honest I probably don't succeed, I am much more likely to downvote someone who cites the dread pirate jim or whoever than I am to downvote somebody who cites Aquinas.

With the addendum that I automatically downvote anyone who tries to work the refs and complain about downvotes. "I know this is controversial..." downvoted. "I'm gonna get a lot of downvotes for this..." downvoted. " "Hot take here, but maybe [obvious statement]..." downvoted. If your comment has the word downvote in it, 99% chance I'm downvoting it.

I will say that I think up/downvotes are one of those discourses that is most full of liars. Almost everyone claims they don't care and it's stupid if you do, but most people do care at least some of the time. Everyone claims that the downvote button isn't a disagree button, or whatever weirdo shit they're claiming, but it obviously is used that way on every forum I've seen with the system in place. Everybody "knows" that upvotes don't mean a quality post and downvotes don't mean a bad post, but periodically you see the argument brought back up that my post has x number of upvotes so some people agree.

The reality of up/downvotes is that people use it primarily with the goal of "I would like the author of this post to feel good" vs "I would like the author of this post to feel bad." The rest of the motivation is largely extraneous.

Are you selective with your votes or do you vote on most/all posts you see?

Selective/absent-minded.

Do you find yourself upvoting people you disagree with due to the quality of their argument, or vice versa?

I fairly-reliably upvote (and rate "high-quality" on the volunteer page) for convincing me of something, which requires that I disagreed - in the past tense. If I disagreed before and still do, well, why would I upvote it? Clearly it was untrue and/or not very convincing if I still disagree!

Do you downvote people you're arguing with or do you leave judgement entirely to the masses?

I mean, it depends. If someone's arguing with me in good faith and politely, no. If someone tells me to jump off a cliff, or someone's being disingenuous, sure, downvotes.

Do you remove the auto self-upvote on your posts/comments?

No. It's a community decision to not reward people for upvoting their own posts; the point of this would be negated if scrupulous people started undoing it.

I only use it to downvote people I disagree with. There's an addon for Reddit that shows total down/upvotes for users, and it's nice to see how many total downvotes I've given them. I wish that was a thing on the motte too.

But I'm not very argumentative so I use it more for specific people rather than in general.

What are The Motte's top study Bibles? I know not most Mottizens thing, but curious. My wife started teaching a Sunday school and was impressed by my NASB. Well we've got that covered so I figured something else. I'm seeing the RSV Study bible coming highly recommended. I remember the Ryrie being popular in the late 1990's.

Orthodox Study Bible

https://www.stepbible.org/

I would think you’d get more mileage out of a commentary, though, if you wanted to teach.

I have been very impressed with Robert Alter’s translation of the Old Testament. On each page there’s a few lines of Bible passage, and the rest of it is commentary. It’s glorious.

https://www.amazon.com/Hebrew-Bible-Translation-Commentary-Three/dp/0393292495

What sort of church do you go to? That might affect what's popular, as preferred translations shift, and some theological opinions. I believe knowableword.com rated a bunch of study bibles, but I haven't looked at that in a long time, and have no idea to what extent I'd agree with their rating system.

I like the Biblehub commentaries for ease of use and I also like Abarim Publications word studies even if he is kind of insane. After that, I’ll maybe look to see what Origen / Tertullian had to say. For Old Testament, Philo’s allegorical readings are goated. For particular interesting passages I’ll run a search on AcademicBiblical (Reddit) or the EarlyWritings forum. Is there any interesting passage or book you’re interested in right now?

Right now she's just really in to jumping around connecting all the uses of the words in Hebrew and Greek.

Well, don't go too overboard with that. Just because a word is used some way in one passage doesn't mean that it has that valence in every passage.

If you have Hebrew or Greek questions at some point, I've done a little of each, so feel free to message me, I won't mind. Can't guarantee that I'll know the answers to whatever question, but I'll probably have a bit better of a sense than someone who's done none.

Not a question, just a commentary. Those can go here, right?

May the Lord bless 200x-201x forum culture. I weep for a future where it is entirely absent.

I recently ran into an issue with an older car. I don't drive it much, but I like that it has real buttons, drives nice, and isn't worth selling. It's not a special car, so there's no living fandom to squeeze for this particular model/year. If there is, then I didn't think to seek it out. There was, however, a treasure trove that was old forum culture. This history saved me some time, pain, and brain cells.

All because a guy 15 years ago had the same problem. He started a thread on this problem. No one else helped or even replied to this particular thread. This was only one man posting his frustrations and thoughts into the void. He tells the void what kind of failure it looks like. A few days later he details his frustration with a diagnosis and troubleshooting. Tried this, no luck. Thought it was that, nope. He tells us about his next plan of action and what it might be if it wasn't that.

Despite the lack of replies, forum guy returns a couple days later to tell the void he has figured it out. He lets Future Strangers know this, because this is what being a member of a hobby group is. You take what you need, then contribute when you can. The next day he posts again: don't forget a new O-ring! Sometimes they rot away and you wouldn't even notice because they'd be missing. Also, in case you didn't know here are the exact dimensions of the O-ring. (Diagrams were maybe not as readily available back then.) It doesn't matter to me that these old parts distributors mentioned are long gone. Amazon is a convenient replacement.

That one other guy, maybe one of a dozen that had the same obscure issue went out of his way to save me time. All for nothing except an extra point on his post counter and, potentially, a feeling that he was helping out the boys that had taught him in kind. Maybe the thread was a natural expression of his frustration. Unlike me, he didn't have an Old Forum Guy resource to draw upon.

Forums still exist. We're typing on one. Even the particular forum I referenced still exists. Much of forum culture has been paved over-- often improved -- with new forum-esque platforms, subreddits, DIY videos, and AI. So many more people helping others selflessly-- or for karma, Instagram followers, Youtube supplemental income, and passing the time. In which case this post is just an appreciation post of the internet. It's pretty sweet. Because calling your mechanic friend for troubleshooting more than once a year is bad etiquette, and putting a car in the shop takes more of everything.

In this case the newer hubs of troubleshooting didn't help me. Old Forum Guy did. Bless his heart. I'll think about you the next time I tap out, Old Forum Guy.

The Mazda trucking forum went down at one point and I instantly lost the ability to service my truck. You don't realize how important these communities were until they're gone.

This is why I don't like Discord. So much information lost in the ceaseless churn of messages.

I hadn't considered that before. If technical or DIY Discord servers exist they should definitely try to save searchable logs for posterity. Already an entire Great Library has been lost with IRC chats.

Why do people find mental retardation repulsive? It's been my experience that generally, conditions like Down's Syndrome, autism, etc produce an instinctive "ick" reaction in other people. To the credit of most people, they do their best to cover it up and treat the afflicted individuals kindly - but it doesn't come naturally to them to do so.

Given that this seems (in my experience) to be fairly widespread, it seems to be a reaction that is pretty ingrained in human nature. So what might be the cause of this tendency?

First, I agree that people generally act with too much revulsion. I've spent more time with the mentally disabled than some and it's not that bad.

People have touched on general aversion to illness and the physical components of things like Down's Syndrome.

I'll add a few more things:

  • People who are retarded generally have very poor work ethics, which influences hygiene. Without sufficient pressure from caretakers and knowledge, the default will be dirty clothes and a dirty living space.
  • Lack of rationality can lead to some negative moral outputs. Retarded people have their own hierarchy where they victimize the dumbest or meekest among themselves. They can be as selfish and mean-spirited as children, which is distasteful to see in an adult.
  • Many people rightfully dread carrying along a conversation with someone who has a mental disability. It's a constant push and pull of trying to figure out what they're saying, deciding to agree or disagree with them, and constantly calibrating a totally alien quantity of IQ and EQ. It's exhausting until you know somebody really well, and even then it's still not easy.

While I think the retardation you're talking about is genetic, a lot of other things that feel similar to retardation can be caused environmentally. Disease, severe head trauma, severe malnutrition, environmental poisoning. All bad things that if they happened to them, might happen to you if you get too close to them.

Human nature isn't a fine grained thing, it tends to over rather than under index its fears. Humans recoiling from the ill is something of an inchoate sense of germ theory of disease, or of a social order in which strong allies are valuable while weak allies are liabilities.

This is why so many heroic legends relate to carrying the ability to discern the secret abilities and importance of those who we reflexively recoil from.

Why do people find mental retardation repulsive?

Because it is subset of illnesses in general. People generally speaking dislike ill people.

Many types of mental retardation also come with physical defects that make the person ugly. When that's not true, I don't think it's an instinctive "ick" so much as their condition makes them not very good conversationalists. So you talk to them for fifteen minutes and decide you don't really want to talk to them any longer.

From a biological perspective, humans are wired to survive and reproduce. Having allies and mates who are socially well-adapted to the local culture helps achieve these goals. This is because social support from people with power gives you access to useful resources that you could not acquire on your own. People implicitly/unconsciously know that people with mental conditions do not make the best allies/mates when they have the option to be allies/mates with mentally healthier people.

People are selecting for unconscious predictors to the question of if the person makes a good ally/mate. That is why Elon Musk (who has Aspersers) can overcome the "ick" treatment by demonstrating qualities that make him a good ally/mate.

People cover up their instinctual repulsions because they are following the current cultural norms of polite society.

People with disabilities often try to distance themselves from other people that have a lower-functioning version of the same disability. This is because it is a strategy that enhances their own image as a potential ally/mate.

Unpredictability. Subconsciously, we’re thinking, “Something is off about this person. Is he about to have an inappropriate (and perhaps even violent) reaction to something I say or do?” It’s why the revulsion to mentally retarded children isn’t nearly as extreme. The fact that most mentally retarded people are unusually ugly is probably another, albeit minor, factor, as most people are naturally drawn to beauty and repulsed by ugliness.

I think this is it. Also you can’t trust a retard to pick up on social cues, or to be able to use any. If all your tools for navigating a social interaction are useless, what are you left with?

Also why the revulsion to mentally ill women isn't nearly as extreme. "This person could literally beat me to death" combined with "This person plausibly might decide to try to beat me to death" is scary.

Interesting tidbit from the new NBC News poll: Project 2025 has a net favorability rating of negative 53 points. Only 4 percent of registered voters have a positive opinion of it.

I realize that basically nobody has actually read the 922 page policy document, but how does a pretty mainstream conservative policy agenda end up with lizardman numbers?

Distaste for Project 2025 is, in my opinion, the most naked example of media conspiracy to demonize a nothingburger. This is the Heritage Foundation, they're going to be recommending conservative policies that that've been recommending every day for the past 40 years. The song remains the same.

But, as you pointed out, it's a wonkish, highly dense policy agenda that 99% of people won't read. They will read headlines that equate it to a plan for female slavery. They'll associate it with ORANGE MAN BAD and think it's his personally crafted Plan For World Domination.

I think it gets down to the simple reality that "Project 2025" has a bit of a conspiratorial sound to it. If they had named it something like, "The Heritage Plan for Restoring American Family Values," I think it becomes much more difficult to get people to latch onto it. It sounds corporate and boring.

how does a pretty mainstream conservative policy agenda end up with lizardman numbers?

Half of the electorate is against because it's a roadmap for the other team, and the team it's a roadmap for has had its marching orders from the boss to say they don't like it.

It's the inverted equivalent of Woke. Much as Woke is an amorphous exonym that contains everything you don't like about liberals, Project 2025 is an amorphous conspiracy that contains everything you don't like about conservatives. Nobody is defending Project 2025, much as nobody defends Woke.

If you hear about it from liberals it's bad. If you hear about it from Trump he says he knows nothing about it, which given his record on prior endorsements from Bad Hombres would tell you as a Trump Voter it must be double plus bad. Seriously, every other flier I get from Trump is about how he disavows project 2025!

Is it really mainstream? I scrolled to somewhere in the middle randomly and they're talking about restricting money spent on food stamps. We're talking about a program that's 2% of federal outlays and about 20% of Americans have used food stamps at some point. Does anyone actually give a shit about cutting this program?

It's created by the Heritage Foundation and is generally in line with the Republican party agena of the past few decades. Heavier on social conservatism than libertarianism, as Heritage is a social conservative think tank.

I'm curious if any Republican candidates have run on cutting SNAP. I suspect not.

There's multiple ways you can read what Newt Gingrich says here. I'll let you decide if this counts.

Cutting welfare in general is a mainstream conservative position (cutting any specific program tends to be quite unpopular, but you gotta start somewhere). Poor people actually tend to be fatter than middle class or rich people, so there seems to be a caloric excess on the margin among food stamp recipients.

As you pointed out, 10% of EBT goes to hyper-sugary drinks which are essentially poisons for the people on food stamps.

We're subsidizing shitty food or playing some endless whack-a-mole of trying to paternalistically stop the underclass from eating themselves to death. It seems like they're hellbent on doing it anyway, so I'm not a fan of food stamps.

I'm not saying that a motte contrarian can't talk himself into it. I'm wondering if it's actually "mainstream conservatism" given that people want to win elections.

It's not really aimed at the general public, but at the Republican Presidential candidates and the people who might make up their cabinet if they get elected. Nobody cares much about selling the general public on how it's totally super awesome. Only conservatives who are hardcore policy wonks would actually read it. There's probably not much to be gained from any Republican candidate for office talking about how it's great and they promise to do it all either.

The Liberal institutions picked up on it as something they can scare their base with. It's easy and in their interest to go wall-to-wall selling everyone on how it's totally super terrible and horrifying and every Republican definitely seriously wants to do it, regardless of how much truth there is to that. And so, the overall public perception is super bad.

I guess this begs the question of: what exactly do Republican voters think they're voting for? What do they even want to vote for? I can understand why Trump himseld would want to distance himself from Project 2025, but why would conservative voters not want to support it? Are they just stupid?

Maybe this is exactly the expected result? Is 4% the actual proportion of non-stupid conservative voters in the general population? Everyone else is either not conservative, or just thinks whatever Trump tells them to? I can't say I have any evidence against this hypothesis.

They're probably voting for an expression of values and a meme-length description of what they want to do. Which is exactly what probably at least 90% of all voters on both sides of every election everywhere does. I don't think any of those Democrat voters could articulate exactly what Project 2025 is and why they think it's bad either.

I'd love it if the great majority of the voter base voted based on thoughtful consideration of actual policy positions, but it's just not realistic. If you want to win in any system resembling democracy, you're going to have to accept that there's more than a few idiots and nutcases on your side.

Republican voters think they're voting for an end to political correctness, a secure border, lower inflation, etc. Much like the median democrat, they're a bit fuzzy on what that means.

Honestly, because nobody has actually read the dumb thing. All they know is the scare monger stuff that’s out there. I’m not necessarily in favor of some parts of it, but to listen to the talk, it’s Mein Kampf as a policy manual. Even at its worst, it is not that, but until you can put those pages under the noses of the people, it’s impossible to have any reaction other than negative to a policy that is being held up as evil and that nobody is reading.

Most people would not care I think if they knew just how mundane most of it is.

So, what are you reading?

I’m still on Future Shock and The Cheese and the Worms. Also going through Sabatini’s Scaramouche, which seems considerably more interesting than the film.

Struggling with "Electric Machinery Fundamentals" and "Introduction to AC Machine Design", making good time on "How to Keep House When You're Drowning". ACMD has a hilariously math-heavy approach that I imagine I'd appreciate if I were still a student with vector calculus competence, but I honestly doubt I ever was, and I don't think my degree program ever required an EM Fields course, so it's an intimidating slog that seems to only serve to back up the engineering equations given in EMF.

HtKHWYD, contrariwise, is gloriously pragmatic, and I like both the content and the presentation quite a bit for how pedestrian it is. Lady has a skillset to communicate, communicates it, communicates fine points and failure points, and does nothing else. I appreciate that.

Read “Earth” by John Boyne (author of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas) this weekend. Short novel, second in a series of interconnected “Elements” stories. (Water previously published, Fire and Air to come).

SPOILERS BELOW

Quick and easy read, 165 pages that zip along. Narrator is a young professional footballer in the UK who has been implicated in a high profile rape trial. (He’s charged with accessory to rape, his mate, a more high profile teammate, with rape.) The narrator is gay and came to football via an unconventional route, having previously worked as a rentboy for wealthy, sordid and powerful figures.

It has 1000s of reviews on Amazon and Goodreads at an average of 4.3, plus a lot of positive attention in mainstream media (at least in UK/Ireland, not sure about US etc), so you’d think it’s worth a couple of hours, right?

Yes. But not for the reasons you might think.

Almost all the characters are male (central and peripheral):

  • Narrator
  • Teammate / rapist
  • Narrator’s father
  • Rapist’s father
  • A pimp who hires out rentboys for wealthy men
  • A knighted Lord (“Sir”) who hires rentboys for his sordid pleasure
  • A priest
  • A barrister
  • Another teammate / gay f***buddy
  • A farmer’s son
  • A football coach

With the possible exception of the priest (a Stereotypical Man of Great Spiritual Understanding) and the barrister (a 2D legal eagle) all male characters are uniformly loathsome, lying, controlling, screening, misogynistic, raping pricks.

Those Amazon and Goodreads reviews are FULL of 5-star reviews from women. The media/newspaper reviews all seem to be left-leaning, virtue-signalling, vapid and vacuous.

Lots of reviewers called it “disturbing”. I think so too, but for very different reasons than they do.

It’s worth reading, and also disturbing, to see up close just how anti-man mainstream publishing has become.

I believe it’s one of the most dangerous books I’ve ever read, because it underscores something I’ve been observing in publishing.

Complex reality, including the inner world psychodrama of human beings, used to be the thing intelligent fiction did brilliantly. It is possible to learn as much about humanity from reading a handful of books by Austen, Dostoevsky, Dickens and Hemingway as you’d get from a hundred lifetimes. Now, mainstream fiction is another front in the war against reality. Instead of learning about humanity you will more often fill yourself with disinformation, much of it from self-flagellating male authors keen to impress feminists and men who deny their own balls.

This book could easily have been called “All Men Really Are Bastards”.

This is purely anecdotal, but from my experience with yaoi/gay porn, female artists/writers are much more likely to include guro or psychological torture in their works than male ones. Even when they draw both yaoi and straight porn, they will only include it in yaoi. And this has been the case probably the last 20 years, and a lot of these artists are Japanese as well so it's not something contained to the West.

So as a whole this doesn't really seem very surprising. Rather than this becoming an indication of anti-male publishing, it's an indication that what used to be fanfiction people read in private, rose to the mainstream. The publishers are delivering female targeted fiction, for their female majority fanbases. If you want an actual example, you just need to look at Fifty Shades of Grey. The movie is rated 4.2/10, but you can find thousands of stories like it on Ao3.

I don't think that this is really a bad thing. In general mainstream has become something that panders to all demographics which I don't find very interesting, so the development of new works that are targeted specifically to either men or women doesn't seem like a bad thing. Like in Japan, it's been like that for ages, where you have shoujo that is targeted towards girls, and primarily watched by girls. And you have plenty of harem power fantasies as well as regular shounen that are targeted towards boys and watched by boys. Although shounen has acquired a bigger female audience recently.

I know nothing about any of that, other than the observation that the internet (where I’m assuming lots of what you talk about lives or are least has deep roots in) is opening up thousands or millions of new niches to cater for and profit from new interest groups.

But honestly, I don’t think it’s relevant at all to this point. This is about mainstream publishing and society/culture. Which has become extremely anti-male/anti-masculine in the past ~10 years.

I’m talking UK/Irish literary fiction, which is not internet native. It’s offline establishment native. It holds a powerful influence over the conversations being had by normie people who don’t spend any time on Reddit or X (and who might not be able to find Reddit or X if you asked them to).

As a sideways related example, Entourage was a hit mainstream US show, centering on four male characters and their interests, ambitions struggles, screened between 2004-11. When you watch it now and realise that there’s an almost 0% chance of anything like it being approved now, never mind be given prime time slots for years, you realise how far the mind virus has gone in the decision making corridors of power across all mainstream publishing and media.

I agree with the BahRamYou that there's no malevolent conspiracy. Women simply spend more money on media they consume. So publishers cater to them.

I’m talking UK/Irish literary fiction, which is not internet native. It’s offline establishment native.

The ones I talked about with shounen/shoujo is offline. It has physical sales. Same thing in China. Where despite the CCP's stance against homosexuality some of the most popular novels and tv shows are danmei, which are stories with gay romance, but without the sex and kissing. Whose fanbase is primarily female.

As a sideways related example, Entourage was a hit mainstream US show, centering on four male characters and their interests, ambitions struggles, screened between 2004-11. When you watch it now and realise that there’s an almost 0% chance of anything like it being approved now, never mind be given prime time slots for years, you realise how far the mind virus has gone in the decision making corridors of power across all mainstream publishing and media.

If you want stories that are made for and by men, there's plenty of webnovels you can read on Royalroad or self published on Amazon, or fanfics on Spacebattles or other sites.

And actually there are still shows made primarily for men. Reacher, Jack Ryan, Terminal List. Adaptations of novels that probably do still have a primarily male readership.

I agree, but I don't think there's any malevolent conspiracy at work here. It's just that TV, and especially books, are more of a female market. So the publishers naturally make stuff aimed at women, which attracts more of a female audience and also creates a pipeline where the only new writers getting trained are the sort of people who can write that stuff. And over time it just becomes more and more extreme. The guys go elsewhere to things like sports, video games, anime, and internet blogs.

I think the male exploitation/male victim and male perpetrator definitely has a female audience that is captivated by it. I think it's idealizing a sexuality and preference with an absence of pregnancy scares, where all activity exploitative or otherwise doesn't change a persons mental status, with characters not bogged down by the 'All Women are Wonderful' and allowed to villainous.

Several years ago I rented the film 'My private Idaho' from the library (awful even, with young Keanu Reeves and River Phoenix mixes Shakespeare prose and street urchins to ill effect) where the dvd jacket had a interview with the writer JT LeRoy (I believe pre-unmasking of the author) who gives fraudulent story about her watching the film while working as a male prostitute in the Castro district (what a bizarre cultural relic).

How have we not discussed the nuzzi/RFK drama yet?

What's there to say? I don't actually understand why it's such a big story.

The idea that RFK sleeping with a reporter lead to media bias against Biden, strikes me as similar to the MTG endorsed theory about Harris having the debate questions in advance. Lack of evidence of impact.

I am, however, still waiting on the Mark Robinson post here, but I also have no idea what to say about that.

I think with the affidavit signed by a whistleblower it's more than a "theory" that she had the questions. That's more proof that was enough to impeach a President. More precisely, she had been given "example questions" - which were supposed to be "a kind of" questions she is going to be asked but not exactly those (we can't verify it of course because we don't have the questions they were given, but it sounds believable). Of course, we have no indication the other side got the same deal IIRC.

The idea that RFK sleeping with a reporter

They never slept with each other. Reports say Nuzzi was "sexting" RFK, which included her allegedly sending nude pictures.

I feel like posters would have a bunch of interesting cultural commentary and tangents based on the story. It's a big story because it's drama you can gawk at involving notable people that a bunch of people already disliked, not because it's important or anything.

- What shall we do about RFK affair with 30 years old?

- We shall envy him.

I wonder how many people can recognize a Stalin quote.

An alleged Stalin quote, at any rate. As Lenin famously said, people attribute all kinds of inanities to famous people on the Internet.

No idea what that is, want to explain it?

A journalist wrote some pro-RFK articles, then was revealed to have had a sexual relationship with him. It's particularly scandalous because she's thirty and he's seventy. I think they were just sexting not fucking.

That's all? Young female journo infatuated with an older high-status male? And they didn't even have sex? Pfui!

Given that the media as a whole seems pretty anti-RFK as far as I've seen, I'm gonna say "meh" to this.

It's really seen more of a failure of her ethics than his, although discrediting one of the few journalists who liked him probably counts for something. Really the far bigger issue with him is that he cheated on his wife with dozens of women at all

IT'S ABOUT ETHICS IN GAMING POLITICAL JOURNALISM

...

I mean, from what I've heard about JFK, I'm not at all surprised to hear another member of the Kennedy family was up to similar shenanigans. And now that RFK's endorsed Trump I don't think there's any salvaging his reputation among the anti-Trumpers regardless.

She was the one who was sexting by the sounds of it. No word of RFK nudes being sent but seemed to be plenty of hers landing in RFK’s phone. Gotta hand it to him. There’s not a man out there who wouldn’t be happy about this when he’s 70.

make a post brah

Does anyone have tips on how to use to internet to gain wisdom? I know there is content that will make me wiser, or have some beneficial impact on my life, but what I’m looking for is very ill-defined and non-specific.

Searching for this type of content feels like a slot machine where most pulls pay nothing, but very occasionally you hit a nice payoff that keeps you addicted.

For example, finding Scott Alexander or John Vervaeke had highly positive outcomes to me, but I had to wade through a ton of internet garbage to find them.

This search is also complicated by other factors:

  • Once you find and engage with the gems you get sorted into an algorithm that keeps feeding you similar content and then it can switch from being helpful to just being confirmation bias.
  • The garbage isn’t easily identifiable because most content is knowledge that helps you stay current and connected with other people that consume it.
  • Other people can’t reliably help you find the gems because they are driven by tribalism/jealousy/biases. For instance, I can’t rely on the New York Times or rationalwiki to decide if Scott Alexander belongs in the gem or internet garbage bucket.
  • Some wise people seem weird when you first encounter them because their ideas are different than your own. Yet, sometimes their weird perspective is exactly what you need to gain wisdom.

Personally I think a lot of "wisdom" is over rated. My recommendation is to look for stuff backed by math, like game theory. This lecture series by Yale is great: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6EF60E1027E1A10B

I also recommend the book "Algorithms to Live By".

but what I’m looking for is very ill-defined and non-specific.

Aristotle defined wisdom as the knowledge of general causes and underlying prinicples.

[T]he man of experience is thought to be wiser than the possessors of any perception whatever, the artist wiser than the men of experience, the master-worker than the mechanic, and the theoretical kinds of knowledge to be more of the nature of wisdom than the productive.

If most of the internet is shallow, that's because it floods you with the lowest form of knowledge, perception. Wisdom is knowledge of underlying causes, and that's what SlateStarCodex focused on in its heyday. Rather than honing in on particulars, he attempted to create sweeping principles like Moloch that explain phenomena across all walks of life. It's not a new approach, the late 19th century especially was a golden age for this type of exploration. So I would recommend you do some deep dives there, and abandon your hopes that the internet has any more of it. This is a very rare style of thinking. Most people of any era are dogmatists who cling to failing theories because they lack the ability to make their own. You could show them all the examples that led to Moloch, but they wouldn't generate the theory because they can't do that. It's a real hopeless quest trying to find people who can nowadays. Ditch the 'net, read books.

I like how you clarified what wisdom is. The content that I like the most is attempting to explain underlying causes across time, perspectives, and often domains. I agree that it is hard to find this on the internet.

read books

Do you have any tips on determining which books contain useful wisdom? I still run into the problem of sorting out the good content from the garbage.

The other problem with books is that they often aren't timely/relevant unless you have the ability to connect them to modern knowledge/issues. Social media and other technological advancements have significantly changed the world.

The wisdom in many books no longer directly applies to the current world because it is optimized for environments that no longer exist. Some people have the ability to connect/adapt that wisdom to today's world. If you lack that ability then it could make more sense to focus only on current content where other people make those connections for you.

Do you have any tips on determining which books contain useful wisdom?

Know thyself. Also, know your methodology. If you're deep into statistics and not big on deduction, you're going to be locked out of nearly all intellectual history. That a book covers something you care about is irrelevant if its type of logic is meaningless to you.

The other problem with books is that they often aren't timely/relevant unless you have the ability to connect them to modern knowledge/issues. Social media and other technological advancements have significantly changed the world.

If you care about "underlying causes across time, perspectives, and domains", then timeliness doesn't matter. Time is the vector that allows us to see meaningful change in our world, so if you want to know things like "Why do humans go to war?" or "Why do we have money?" you need to study history. It will not have immediate practical advantage, but it's knowledge in the true sense and helps you build up a grasp of underlying causes. If some knowledge becomes outdated, it is not wisdom. Modern scholars would accuse the classics of being outdated, yet Napoleon studied Alexander and took over Europe.

Do you think that Grim Beeper (the attack on Hezbollah pagers) puts us in uncharted waters - war crimes law wise. Usually the assumption is that the location attacked is well defined whereas who is inside is fuzzier. Here we have the opposite - who is attacked is extremely precisely defined, but when they pressed the make go boom button they had no idea where the booms would be.

My worry has been that some of the explosions could have happened on passenger jets... How did the Israelis know they wouldn't down hundreds of innocents?

According to the Times of Israel, the Hezbollah devices were detonated individually, with precise intel on targets (reddit link).

It feels like poor taste to gloat, but called it. Err, maybe rather, I am pleased to see that my prediction was acceptably-calibrated.

So like, are there hundreds of explosive pagers that ended up in god-knows-where that they just didn't detonate?

I think one needs to treat every single device manufactured in Israel as compromised in some way by Mossad. I would not want Israeli chips in my smartphone.

If you work for Hezbollah, that is a smart precaution. If you don't, you are just being silly. Which is of course your right, but the thought that Israel would waste top intelligence talents and years of intelligence work to target a random guy on the internet is hilarious. Maybe they'll start with stealing one of your shoes?

I would not want Israeli chips in my smartphone.

You already have Israeli chips in at least one of your devices, most likely your laptop. (Intel has a fab in Tel Aviv.)

I assume that it require a lot of stars to align together in a bad way. There no way to receive the signal while at cruising height. 20 grams of petn is not that much - I doubt it could cause decompression even on a window seat. Let alone serious structural damage. Also it is explosive - there doesn't seems to be reports about it bringing fire. I think that there may be one critical moment if this happened in just the right time during takeoff, in just the right seat. And they may have just excluded the airport cell from firing the command.

I mean true, but I think this event is going to change security in airports. While this event didn’t down any planes because it was fairly careful and used small charges, it certainly will make security more concerned about things like cellphones and beepers and iPads on airplanes simply because this sort of attack is now possible even without the person being aware of the explosive, and even though the device itself still works. Had the tampered device not worked they would have gotten new ones long ago. So we know that as far as the end users knew the device worked and it wasn’t doing anything unusual. Now you have a new risk in the form of every cellular device that goes onto that airplane, even if you turn it on and can use it, it might still blow up.

Laptops have been screened since forever. As were any container that is enough to pack enough explosives to hurt a plane. Including every cellular device, of course. I'm pretty sure if Hezs put their pagers through the airports scanners, stuff would light up - but most of them probably were too busy with other things to fly to an international vacation, or they left their work pagers at home.

Too small of explosions for that from the videos I saw

Despite supporting the attack and thinking it's unbelievably cool and hilarious: yes. Supply Chain as a vector of attack has been a thing in software forever, but it frankly makes me more anxious about the US outsourcing what seems like every meaningful element of production (mostly to our primary strategic enemy).

We already let China poison our children with lead every once in a while, and we've become unthinking lemmings about every super-dense electronic device being totally unserviceable. We're tracked constantly with GPS. The establishment already uses our laziness as a weapon through lawfare, but now has a true PoC if they ever choose to take it to the physical realm.

Grim Beeper

Amazing, did you come up with this?

Stolen from Twitter

Not sure it’s the dumbest question I’ve ever asked but it is one I’ve never asked in real life (maybe because I’m too embarrassed to ask it, maybe because I’ve never had someone good to ask it to…)

How do you think about maximising your earnings? Asked another way: How do you go about making the most money for the least effort without breaking the law?

One small thing to tack on that normies love to talk about is maximizing credit card/rewards point systems. It's a game you have to play to tread water, and you can get some marginal benefits on top of it if you do it well.

Churning is nowhere near as lucrative as it used to be, but when you're making not a ton of money it's an impactful hobby to start, and then using the correct credit cards for what you spend money on can be multiple thousands a year if you make and spend more.

I've maximized earnings primarily by using my well-off parents' existence to take financial risks other people can't, which have all paid off. A major one was renting a house for ~2.5 years when I moved into another.

I also dabble in class-action suits for fun (the profit is minimal). I'd be comfortable committing minor insurance fraud by falsifying documents and pirating any media that's not available DRM-free.

The toughest part of your question isn't most money or least effort or even without breaking the law.

It's "you." Who are you? What are your opportunities? What are your skills? What are you willing to devote effort and energy to?

My wife has obvious assets and paths to easy money that I don't, outside of some flexibility on my part. The more tech oriented people on here are going to have paths open to them that I don't, my credentials and connections open up paths to me that they don't have.

And what are your moral and legal compromises? Below @faceh says that he views personal injury law as scuzzy. One might have the same view of PI, or criminal defense, or big corporate firms, or prosecution, or anything. There's always someone who finds what you do morally incorrect.

Well the way to increase earnings is to get a better paying job or a promotion, there's a whole ecosystem of advice on how to do that.

If you focus more on the 'least effort' part then the answer is usually to put your money in a low-fee stocks & shares index fund, like Vanguard.

The third part, which admittedly wasn't part of your question, is to spend less money. That way you have more to invest or pay off debts.

Can you give us any information about your personal circumstances, goals, abilities etc?

Sort of depends on what you're comfortable with ethics-wise.

For instance, I didn't go into Personal Injury law even though it promises to be lucrative because the entire area feels scuzzy and designed to take advantage of people at their most vulnerable.

But I found an area that pays well enough (if you put in the work) and doesn't require me to check my principles at the door.

I'd suggest that if you're excluding all other priorities and have lax but not completely discarded ethics, sales is the line of work that will end up providing the earning potential. If you're really good at it, you can move up to selling larger and larger ticket items and thus the commissions you receive will grow proportionally. Once you're at the level of, say, selling yachts to multimillionaires, and you've mastered the craft, I'd suggest that is likely the lowest effort/money ratio of most careers.

How do I? I don't. Maximizing my earnings isn't a goal of mine and I've never structured my life to maximize them. For anyone that's tolerably well-off monetarily, I would suggest against earnings-maxing in a refined way, it's just not going all that likely to maximize life-satisfaction. I would strongly suggest thinking in terms of tradeoffs rather than extremes.

Say you’re not “tolerably well off monetarily”. What would you say to someone who has generations of poverty (often extreme poverty) in their genes and wants to break that cycle?

If you're in the US, breaking out of generations of poverty boils down to:

  • Not making truly idiotic financial decisions
  • Becoming a great employee

That's it. If you do these two things, you will have multiple leadership opportunities and a comfortable living. Every single job I've had, from the crappy to the great, has eventually led to a manager realizing I deserved to be paid more than my peers and given more power and control of my destiny. A server at a mid-tier restaurant in the US makes an insane amount of money relative to the amount of effort and dedication they put into their job. Oilfield workers are famous for high school graduates making enough money that it takes hookers and high-interest car loans to destroy their future. Literally, just show up on time, try hard, and be friendly with your boss.

If you're struggling with the first, I find this book to be 90% excellent advice for people who have not been educated about money from an early age.

You also said "for the least effort without breaking the law" which implies some sort of shady /r/overwork J2 type thing. I don't think anyone wants to help you with that.

But in terms of maximizing earnings, you can either work harder or do something that is hard.

  1. Work harder. Literally just work more hours. For example, buy a fixer upper house and get roommates. Pay the mortgage with the rent you bring in. Fix up the house. Sell it. You'll make money since rich people want to buy a house that is move-in ready, not needing repair. Another example, you can detail cars for people and charge at least $50/hour. Or, more easily, just find a job that pays overtime and work lots of overtime.

  2. Do something hard. There are tons of high-paying jobs that many people just don't want to do because they suck. For example, accounting. If there's something you don't mind doing that pays well, this can be okay. The big category of high-paying jobs that suck is owning a business. Most people just want to draw a check with zero risk or effort.

Who has fun stories about saints/spiritual figures?

My favorite is Saint Thomas Aquinas. He wanted to be celibate and his dad disagreed. His father ended up sending a prostitute to his room, and Thomas literally grabbed a flaming stick from the fire and beat her away, then used the torch to draw a cross on the wall or some shit.

Hardcore.

Sounds like an extreme maniac (of course, it's probably false anyway). I mean, if the prostitute has already been paid, all he had to do is to tell her "go away, I don't want your services" (or, maybe, just have her sit in a corner for 10 minutes - though for a virgin probably even 5 minutes should be enough - just to be believable and then make her go away) and she would - who wouldn't be happy to get paid without doing any work? If she hasn't been paid (in which case, wtf was his father is thinking?), then pay her and see above. WTF does he need to do with the flaming sticks and what exactly she got beaten for? She was just doing her part of the deal, she didn't do anything wrong. It's not even claimed she was the devil or sent by the devil or anything like that - she was just a hired worker that came to do her work, what the heck she deserved to be beaten with a flaming stick for? This is an insanely messed up story!

Yeah most of the saints were maniacs in one way or another man. Comes with the territory.

The San Francisco guy preached to birds and animals, but didn't hit anybody with flaming logs. That's much better IMHO.

St Jean Vianney was approached by a noticeably plump woman seeking advice- she asked what he recommended for her. He said 'three Lents' referring to the need to eat less.

  • The story of Genesius of Rome. An actor who wanted to parody and mock Christian rituals, he had a religious experience during one of his mock baptisms and genuinely converted. It gives me a fun mental image of an actor whose role is to exaggerate, but one performance his baptism was genuine, and so the audience is left quizzically wondering what is going on, like a Charlie Kaufman skit. It’s also symbolic of the “fake it ‘til you make it” nature of affirmative rituals — probably, in some sense, everyone’s worship is inauthentic until it’s not.

  • St Sebastian is interesting because his art is so sexually-charged. Example 1 and 2. Some mistakenly think that the nature of these paintings is sexual, with the religious garb acting as plausible deniability. But it is closer to the opposite. Girls (and gays) are attracted to attractive men, so portraying an attractive saint in attractive situations is a valid way bring the lustful to God. They start at the lust, they end in identifying with a holy struggle.

Lmao this would be hilarious to watch

also, this is so very you. I love it.

In terms of cantankerous sass, it’s hard to beat St. Lawrence, a third century deacon in Rome. Immediately after the bishop of Rome was executed by order of the emperor, Lawrence was ordered to hand over the church’s treasury. Instead, he spent three days feverishly giving away as much as he could to the poor, then “presented the city's indigent, crippled, blind, and suffering, and declared that these were the true treasures of the Church: ‘Here are the treasures of the church. You see, the church is truly rich, far richer than your emperor!’” This naturally pissed off the authorities, so they decided to roast him alive on a giant gridiron. After he’d been roasting awhile in extreme agony, he told the guards, “Turn me over. I’m done on this side.”

Damn sassy as fk. Holy shit what a beast. I love stories like this hahaha wow. They really made em different back then huh?

It’s also hard not to appreciate St. Jerome, who is most famous for his translation of the Bible into Latin, but who was also, as one scholar put it, an “irascible, morbidly sensitive old curmudgeon,” who made frequent acerbic comments to and about his fellow clergymen, including Sts. Ambrose and Augustine.

A quick search pulled up this article, which includes some other gems:

When Jerome experienced his own sort of exile after the death of his patron Damasus, he venomously hissed at the “Senate of Pharisees” for having driven him from his beloved Rome.

He was not the continent Augustine who never hinted at struggles with concupiscence after his famous moment in the garden that brought him the chastity for which he had been praying. In his mid-seventies, Jerome tells us that it was only when his body was broken by age that he was freed from his disordered desires.

He was not the disciplined Antony of Egypt who spent 20 years alone pursuing a life of renunciation and who perfected the art of self-mastery. He completely failed at his own desert experiment, even though he had dragged his sizeable library across the Mediterranean to keep him company (what a spectacle that must have been!). Years later, he said of his time there that “when I was living in the desert, in the vast solitude which gives to hermits a savage dwelling-place, parched by a burning sun, how often did I fancy myself among the pleasures of Rome. I used to sit alone because I was filled with bitterness.”

Honestly, he sounds a lot like a Mottizen.

Yeah he definitely sounds like he would belong here. A Mottizen in spirit.

Makes you wonder how often a religious vocation was used to mask symptoms of what would now be called autism. Or homosexuality.

My post from last year sparked some discussion of this.

I’m not sure about clergy, but I’d wager a supermajority of religious (monks, nuns, deaconesses, and the like) are autistic.

Eh, my experience with the young women who become nuns is that they tend to be highly agreeable young women wanting to do something valued by the community and the main other thing they have in common is not being baby crazy.

Monks, you may sort of have a point; a lot of them didn't fit in as a layman.

BTW deaconess is not really a monastic thing(Carthusian nuns have some honors of a deacon when fully professed, but they're still just nuns)- a small number of Eastern Orthodox jurisdictions ordain female deacons who are 'in the world' as diocesan clergy, and there are no Catholic deaconesses(although the RCC now has women in minor orders, while the EOC does not). There was such a thing as a 'deaconess' in ancient Christianity but it was a term for women who assisted in certain church administrative tasks and also not a religious vocation.

BTW deaconess is not really a monastic thing

That depends entirely on your tradition. Lutheran deaconesses traditionally (and in the case of at least one deaconess house, still do) live together in community, wear habits, take the honorific “Sister,” and vow to remain celibate for as long as they remain deaconesses.

Homosexuality – I’d guess 9 out of every 10 vocations, at least.

Priests are only about 50% gay and the percentage is dropping.

How could you possibly measure this reliably?

You can't, but it is what the RCC estimates- and I know enough to say that they might be misestimating, but they're definitely not knowingly lying.

More to the point, one of the major roadblocks to addressing clerical sex scandals was that they were often covered up internally by being listed as 'disciplined for violating celibacy- heterosexual prostitute/adult girlfriend', which indicates that while there are gay priests, it's not some 9/10 supermajority.

You can't, but it is what the RCC estimates- and I know enough to say that they might be misestimating, but they're definitely not knowingly lying.

The Rabbinical Council of California?

More to the point, one of the major roadblocks to addressing clerical sex scandals was that they were often covered up internally by being listed as 'disciplined for violating celibacy- heterosexual prostitute/adult girlfriend', which indicates that while there are gay priests, it's not some 9/10 supermajority.

I don't immediately understand the connection between the coverup documentation and the rate of gay priests. Are you saying that if 9/10 priests were gay the sex scandal would be internally listed as "homosexual prostitute" instead?

I would guess that RCC = Roman Catholic Church, but that's just a guess on my part.

Definitely yes.

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