domain:philippelemoine.com
Dean
4hr ago
How are religious beliefs experienced differently?
A chaplain I knew once credited it as to experience the sublime in a way that changes your perspective afterwards on the world.
'Sublime' is a word that's often used as just another synonym for quality in art, but it can mean more than just 'pretty.' Something sublime is something that strikes one with awe- not simply being impressed, but the much more intense feeling of reverential respect mixed with fear and wonder. Once you experience it, you are forever changed, because while your feeling on the thing may change afterwards, the reverence / respect / fear / wonder changes how you see the relation of things.
This is not, to be clear, a 'solely' religious experience. It's a somewhat common attestation of astronauts who go into space and look down on the earth- seeing how small their home countries are puts the their formerly massive worlds into a new perspective. Astronauts, despite coming from often committed career professional paths of government cultures, often have a reputation for being more post-nationalist/more internationalist, not because they don't care about their countries but because their paradigm is shifted by the scale perception and how they view their homelands. That sense of being taken out of your previous perception paradigm and thrust into another has other analogs as well, often when dealing with items of scale- some people get put into awe by nature, or by mega-engineering, or by diving deep into conceptually massive items.
The point here isn't 'what' causes your perception shift, but rather that you have one, and what that means going forward. Just as an astronaut is never going to look at earth the same way again even when they return, or an environmentalist struck by the grandeur of nature will never be as impressed by industrial output, the very way people connect the world together has changed in a way that is not 'merely' a choice.
You do not choose to undergo the sublime experience (you can go look at something other people say is sublime and feel nothing), but likewise when you do experience the sublime you do not 'choose' to let it change you- instead, you are the one changed, because that is part of what strikes the reverence / respect / fear. And after that sort of experience, well... you can try to argue with a converted environmentalist that industrialization is good, and they might be swayed by specific arguments that industrialization may be a net positive for society despite it's harm to nature, but the underlying paradigms of how they put the world together has changed. You can't really argue people out of that any more than you can argue them out of their own visual perception.
Religion is a broad set of dynamics and relations, but the sublime religious experience is broad enough / shared enough that people who have experienced it can find enough of each other to validate and further the beliefs, in a similar sense that you and I both know what 'love' is as an experience despite not knowing eachother or eachother's experiences. For those touched by the sublime, something similar exists, and through it the sense of solidarity that the sublime experience, rather than being purely personal, is a shared sense of something else- and that something else is God, with all the fear / wonder / awe / reverence that implies.
quiet_NaN
4hr ago
The justice system is not designed to handle prosecutors actively trying to thwart punishment of criminals. The solution here seems not to be to add epicycles and do retrials with special prosecutors, but to not re-elect prosecutors who offer sweet-heart plea deals. Oh, wait:
Foxx won a second term even after Smollett’s case became a topic of national outcry.
If her electorate is happy with her, then there is little one can do, I guess.
UwU
4hr ago
Some people purporting to be trans could just be using it to legitimize their cross-dressing fetish, but it’s not a significant enough number to justify the framing, and definitely not in the Sarah McBride case to justify the framing in this circumstance.
Most "trans women" are autogynephiles.
If someone showed me a study concluding that "most men are autogynephiles," I wouldn't have any difficulty believing it. I have seen several studies suggesting that a significant percentage of "straight" men find male genitalia sexually arousing. There is also quite a lot of evidence that men are extremely sexually adaptable, i.e. will have sex with anything, if necessary for release--historical accounts of homosexuality at sea or on long military campaigns contribute much to this perception, but also further edge cases like the cross-cultural recurrence of bestiality. So I'm not sure where arguments like this really get you.
I am sympathetic to "empathy" arguments. I gain nothing, personally, through cruelty to others. However "be nice" cannot possibly mean "always affirm that what others are doing is good for them and/or for society." You say:
So anyway, next time you see some dude in a dress, with long hair and breasts but a face and voice obviously male despite his best efforts, think about what kind of emotions must have driven him to that place, and have a little empathy.
This seems fair, but what is the actionable content of that empathy? When I see a homeless person passed out in the street, filthy, half naked, and clearly stoned out of his mind, surely the empathetic response is not, "aw, look at that guy living his best life. It's not what I would choose, but hey--different strokes for different folks!" Similarly, if I see a man wearing a dress, I'm unlikely to say anything to him about it--but if I see a man walking into a ladies' changing room, I might quite reflexively say, "Hey, do you know that's the ladies' room?" So: what should I do if I see a man in a dress walking into a ladies' changing room? Do I try to help him the way I would try to help any man making that mistake, or do I exempt him from the care I normally afford to others, to help them avoid embarrassing and possibly dangerous errors?
("How do you know he's a man!?" Well, if a man in a dress really looks like a woman, then it would not occur to me to stop him from entering the ladies' room. It's true that I am not always a perfect judge of an individual's sex, but I generally do not permit my own fallibility to stop me from helping others when it seems warranted to do so, and see no reason to deviate from that policy in response to the existence of edge cases.)
I have no reason to defend moralizing busybodies who make a hobby of policing even the tiniest of deviations from the social status quo. But I think there are many reasons to, politely but firmly, refuse to go along with trans advocacy of this kind. For one thing, I suspect that for every person with serious gender dysphoria, there are at least dozens of people whose lives will be made worse by indulging trans advocacy--for example, by giving edge cases a nudge to behave in ways that will actually make their lives worse, than if they had just not. When I read that "28.5% of Gen Z women and 10.6% of Gen Z men identify as LGBTQ+," but in 1992 "3.2% of men and 1.6% of women aged 18–49 identified as gay, lesbian, or bisexual," I find it very unlikely that this is the result of people being more free to behave as their "true selves." Rather, that looks to me like a serious mental health crisis born of a toxic memetic environment. That is: it looks like social contagion. How does one treat social contagion? I don't know, but I feel pretty confident that acting as if there is just nothing wrong or bad or sad or regrettable or even worth mentioning about transsexuality is the opposite of helping.
Not accidentally, your entire post could just as easily have been written about drug addicts, schizophrenics, preppers, Nickelback fans... people like what they like. Tautologically! People do what they do. I don't think there's any reason to be cruel to any of those people. I think it's a better world where we are all kind, and thoughtful, and polite, and treat others with humanity and respect. But that doesn't free us from the hard work of making value judgments, and finding ways to act on those judgments. There is a large-breasted man I see on my walks, sometimes. I have never commented on the fact that he looks like an especially tasteless parody of a woman; I'm pretty sure he knows, and I suspect it's even deliberate. There is also an anorexic woman I see on my walks, sometimes, and I don't comment on her obvious mental issues, either. But if either of them were a family member or particularly close friend--I would definitely comment, and it wouldn't be to affirm the validity or goodness of their choices.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
4hr ago
Agreed. I also prefer two spaces of indentation to four, four is just such a waste of space for (imo) no readability benefit.
07mk
4hr ago
I actually recall watching this film back when I was a teenager, under the belief that it would feature Jennifer Love Hewitt running on a treadmill with just a bra on top (I learned an important lesson at that point that movie studios lie in their marketing). Was a decently funny comedy with its share of laughs, otherwise.
But your question about the fraud reminds me of the real-life fraud conviction in Japan earlier this year of a "sugar baby" who baited lonely men into giving her money. I recall learning of the details of her scam and also wondering why that was illegal, since there was no business transaction, not even implicitly. There was no contract, no sales, no storefront, no promises, nothing of the sort. It seemed akin to a college student asking his parents for money to buy books with the plan to spend it on beer (obviously parent-child relationship is different from this, but also, I don't know why the law would treat it differently). IANAL so I have no idea if I'm just not well versed enough at fraud law, or if Japanese law is different from American.
ControlsFreak
4hr ago
That is later then when the fence was erected. What information am I lacking concerning the how/why of the fence being erected?
Throwaway05
4hr ago
Great sure, some suggested avenues of exploration-
"How much has the number of drugs increased since then? How much has polypharmacy increased since then? How much has comorbidity increase since then? How much has personal behavior in response to healthcare changed since?"
ControlsFreak
4hr ago
Please just explain anything to do with Chesterton's fence. I don't understand, and I want to understand. Perhaps you can bring more information that I am missing about the period of time when this fence was erected, if it is information I am lacking.
SerialStateLineXer
4hr ago
1mg is a good dose, you cannot come off it ever btw, once you start.
Sure you can. You'll start losing hair again, but it's not like you become dependent on it.
ControlsFreak
4hr ago
After a nice sleep last night, I tried really interpreting my interlocutor's most-recent-at-the-time argument about Chesterton's fence, with as much charity as I could. I went on to produce what I thought was almost a quality contribution.
So let me ask you for some advice. I would like to be able to have a productive conversation with this person. I have tried to bring us back to productive conversations and put in effort on my side. What I've gotten in response is accusations of sophistry, that I don't know anything about anything relevant, and claims that if I even consider the questions asked, it will magically become clear to me. I suppose I will trust your read that those comments are actually me becoming more antagonistic, and I will have to review it in time to understand, but can you provide any advice for how I can bring such a conversation back into the realm of being productive? Or do I really just need to give up when this is the type of engagement I'm getting?
Crowstep
4hr ago
SerialStateLineXer
4hr ago
I've never failed a test before :(
Folamh3
5hr ago
But what would he sue them for? Fraud? What exactly is fraudulent about the scam?
You're correct that aspies, nerds or whatever tend to display more feminine traits. In terms of their interests, I would argue they're "hypermale" not just in terms of statistics but also in terms of their character. Men tend to be high-systematisers and interested in abstract systems, while women are more interested in interpersonal relationships. "Intensely interested in abstract systems but utterly lacking in social skills" is about as pithy a definition of "nerd" as you can get, whereas more typically "bro" males tend to be jacks-of-all-trades: they'll have a passing interest in abstract systems (e.g. have memorised Nomar Garciappara's on-base percentage or the acceleration on a '67 Ford Mustang), but without sacrificing the ability to "read the room" and charm people. Most of the stereotypically nerdy interests (systems-heavy video games; hard sci-fi; fantasy universes with elaborate magic systems; conlangs and extensive worldbuilding; electrical engineering; tabletop gaming; computer programming; progressive/technical death metal; IDM; math rock) are about complex abstract systems first and human beings/interpersonal relationships a distant second, if at all. Even saying "nerds like video games" doesn't really sell the distinction I'm getting at: plenty of ordinary dudes will play a little Call of Duty to unwind in the evening, but it takes a certain kind of nerd to log thousands of hours in high-level grand strategy games from Paradox Interactive or learn the entire metagame for Starcraft II. The reason nerds don't have much of an interest in team sports isn't because they're more interested in traditionally feminine interests, but the same reason they don't like playing Call of Duty: they find these activities mechanically shallow and uninteresting from a systems perspective, and are usually not shy about expressing their contempt for the knuckle-dragging mouth-breathers who do derive enjoyment from these activities (the latter clause is "in character" and not what I personally believe, in case it wasn't obvious). Show me a nerdy dude or trans woman who's into knitting, astrology and murder podcasts, and then we can talk about how feminine their interests are.
I am once again asking you to have a little empathy for people you find disgusting
While trans issues are something of an obsession of mine, I usually steer clear of the whole AGP debate, partly because "Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people", and partly because some sense of compassion is indeed stopping me from piling on people who are having a hard enough time going through their life, but the charge of lack of empathy is valid.
Sorry, I just can't understand it, and not for lack of trying. Like you said, empathy for gay people is easy. Love, infatuation, and sexual attraction have largely been involuntary in my experience, so it's not hard to imagine that the target of these feelings ends up being another dude, through some twist of fate.
Dysphoria? Not seeing it. The idea of discomfort at being the wrong gender is alien to me. I'm quite comfortable in my male body, and if you put me in a woman's body tomorrow, I can't think of anything deeper to say about it than "it is what it is", and moving right along.
AGP? Sorry, but your attempts to explain it name it sound even weirder than just leaving it be as an unknown:
Let's say you develop an infatuation with a girl. You enjoy thinking about her. You want to spend time with her. Being near her is pleasant, and comforting, and a little exciting. You want her, just her, not instrumentally, not to do anything in particular, just her, for no reason and every reason. Holding her hand is electric. You just want be with her forever, to sweep her into your embrace, and damn it, why the f&!k are you getting a boner right now, you were having this pure and chaste and beautiful reverie and now you're thinking about sex.
So yeah, it's kinda like that.
Can't relate. That the feelings of infatuation and love end up intertwined with sexual desire is quite expected. Indeed, I'd say that is the very point for either of these feelings to lead to the other, and I'm as skeptical of "pure" infatuation as I am of raw animalistic lust, so I can't at all understand where the thought of "why the f&!k are you getting a boner right now" is coming from.
But actually you lost me right at the start, if there's anything valid to the analogy of infatuation, even the "pure" kind, that just sounds like a very advanced case of narcissism. These feelings are meant for others, not for yourself.
Like I said, far be it for me to add to your burdens, but asking that I understand where you're coming from feels like a tall order.
Throwaway05
5hr ago
You keep accusing me calling you stupid, I'm not. I'm saying you don't know what you are talking about...because you don't. These are not the same thing. Intelligence is not required to make a judgement on this, information is, and you haven't exhibited any evidence of training or knowledge that would address that absence.
Arguing in the way you are now may be evidence of lack of intelligence or character flaws...so don't do that.
Passion on a topic is not a substitute for information or understanding, I've given you a significant number of rabbit holes you could go down to educate yourself on considerations you seem unaware of, and you are resistant to doing that. I also simplified my argument to the bare bones premises and tellingly, you made no effort to engage with those.
Ultimately you've fallen into the same trap that the overwhelming majority of patients who bring up this kind of thing do you, you want to make your own decisions, damn the consequences, without awareness that consequences may even exist and when told "no, you must actually think about this" you become upset and sling mud.
It's fundamentally the same conversation I have every time a patient demands an antibiotic for a viral infection.
These conversations, for the record, are what establishes our stance - because most people become riotously upset when told they need to learn.
AlexanderTurok
5hr ago
I said "Griggs v. Duke Republicans" which are a subset of urban, educated, irreligious voters. RFK Jr., who supports reparations and throwing "climate deniers" in jail is not part of that. He's more a Dale Gribble voter:
https://www.richardhanania.com/p/the-rise-of-the-dale-gribble-voter
ares
5hr ago
I share much of your music taste, although over the past year I've been going down some weird musical rabbit holes that I'll spare you from. Some more "normal" stuff you might enjoy but haven't heard:
- Danger makes good music with dumb titles. The soundtrack to Haven is great.
- CloZee has a lot of great songs. Color of Your Soul and Evasion give you a good idea of what kind of music she makes.
- Why is the soundtrack to FIFA 18's single player campaign so good, and why does EA keep trying to remove it from the internet? I believe this is the third playlist I've had to find after others were removed.
- Phutureprimitive's Kinetik album has been one of my go-tos for listening while coding.
I see a Halo remix you enjoyed, and definitely recommend exploring all the video game songs you enjoyed. Gamechops will do whole albums of a game+genre, like Zelda and Chill. I often find that I like other work by artists I discovered from games, like C418 from Minecraft. And sometimes you find weird stuff that hits you right, like a Mariachi cover of F-Zero Mute City.
DradisPing
5hr ago
Not a lawyer, but criminal fraud laws are loose enough for them to be charged if the prosecutor really wanted to.
As a one off it's hard to imagine them getting charged with anything. Dean could probably sue if he found out, but he wanted to avoid court in the first place.
oats_son
5hr ago
I don't belong in this thread because I don't play Diablo 4, but my experience with speedrunners is that they spend a shit ton of time getting the techniques down. Like, an absolutely massive amount of time, probably talking thousands of hours. So either he's not as busy as he claims, or it's a ghostplayer. Also, it's a very rare busy person that uses his limited amount of time for gaming to play the exact same game that much for that long.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
5hr ago
You are being increasingly antagonistic throughout this thread. If you find someone is aggravating you, take a breath and maybe take a break from the conversation instead of seeing how cleverly you can imply they are stupid and dishonest without breaking the rules.
justmotteingaround
5hr ago
This is fascinating. I would have remained blind to it otherwise, so thanks. I wonder how many other religious people feel this way. I have learned to put conscious effort into empathizing with people taking their religion as literally true. It explains so much, and has changed me for the better. However, I never considered that religious beliefs themselves would be, seem, feel, etc. like they were not a conscious choice.
For example, I prefer exclusively women over men when it comes to having sex. No argument exists which could convince me to sexually prefer men (any more than there is a convincing argument that I prefer eating poo over ice-cream). I'm just not wired to prefer those things. However, I could be convinced to become a Christian or Muslim or Flat Earther or 9/11 truther, or whatever. My non-theism remains a choice. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding something or this is all semantics, hinging on free will or something.
Are deeply held religious beliefs experienced the same way as be deeply held beliefs like murdering random people is wrong, or the Sun is driven by fusion, or the govt shouldn't tax unrealized gains, or the US is a great country, etc. How are religious beliefs experienced differently?
TwiceHuman
5hr ago
It is probably dangerous if you achieve higher control of yourself than average people can. Changing an emotion into another is fairly exotic, but changing the target of emotions is a common defense mechanism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Displacement_(psychology) As far as I'm concerned, all alchemy is actually psychology, but projected into the real world. Embodying an emotion sounds like it could just be a result of attention directed towards an emotion, such that said emotion is the meditation object?
This is basically the process behind all serious meditative/psychedelic states, no? Meditative, probably yes. But in general, all religious, spiritual and sometimes traditional rituals are about achieving exotic states of mind, either ones of very high or very low excitement. I think this is because the brain is mallable (receptive to change) in these states. In "prometheus rising" they talk about how you can reprogram people with LSD, and you probably know about the trance state. You may also know that the brain accepts something as true the first moment you see it, and only judge it afterwards, which is why some advertisement tries to overstimulate you as it delivers its message. It's like these are methods of making our brain "let its guard down" so that we can influence it more, or alternatively ways of getting past the ego.
Am I right to assume that you've read this? https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/20/meditative-states-as-mental-feedback-loops/ I think the main take away is that feedback loops are unnatural, and that the brain tries to prevent them by default. Which is why you need a great concentration and ability to avoid distractions. When accelerating in a fast car or listening to music, I sometimes get chills (ASMR response), but it depends on how I tune my attention. I have to sort of "surf" on the stimuli. This likely generalizes to all senses and emotional responses (chills doing massages and the build-up of tension/anticipation doing important scenes in movies, etc). Does this not imply that feedback loops are the norm? Merely that with most peoples ability to concentrate, they only last a few seconds.
The link you sent sounds like a manic episode. heightened energy, racing thoughts, feeling that things are connected, higher and higher escalation. I sometimes feel like that on stimulants, and when I think about important things thoroughly until I have very strong beliefs (in other words, tidying up doubts and loose ends and other internal conflicts and inconsistencies. If you want to feel really great, spend a few hours doing this). I've often heard that Kundalini has strong effects, and that the "out of body" aspect is dangerous (makes some people go crazy). I think the positive effects come from focusing on your body, mainly the "chakra" areas, and creating feedback-loops on these sensations. By the way, the reason why "out of body" experiences is bad may be because our perception of yourself has a specific place in your head, say between the eyes and back a bit, and that it's dangerous to disconnect from this. You know how it feels like you're floating doing sleep paralysis? This is the brains model of the body, often called the spirit body by mystics, and it may be related to our sense of Proprioception. I don't know if you can accidentally mess up this sense, but it's possible. I personally experience discomfort at times because it feels like my "point of self" is slightly off center, maybe because the left and right side of my face have different sensitivities. Anyway, I've heard that some cultures place their "selves" in the heart rather than in the head, and some crazy book (I forgot which one) recommend shifting this area around as an exercise, so maybe it's not that dangerous as long as you don't move outside of your body, but this is guesswork on my part.
I'm not sure why just focusing on ones heart (or chakras, or kundalini) has strong positive effects, but our brains relation to the body is probably more important than we thought (hence Yoga and such). Books like "The body keeps the score" and some obscure books claim that discomfort and even trauma is basically located in the body and causes muscle stiffness and "blockades" in the "flow of energy" whatever that means.
And about consciousness, what people call "awake" is simply not living on autopilot. To have a consistent sense of self rather than periodic self-awareness with blurs in between, you make your sense of self the object of meditation and train yourself to maintain it at all times. I've read a book on this once as well, but I don't remember the name. Sometimes, meditating on something strengthens it, but sometimes it breaks it down (say a word over and over again and it will lose meaning). I'm not sure how meditation which strengthens the self and meditation which dissolves the self are different. The ways to reinforce things and destroy things seem eerly similar. Meditation makes some people more alert, more alive and more anchored in the moment, while it causes other people to disassociate, have no ego, and become apathetic or stoic. I wish I knew the tiny differences in approach which causes these wildly different outcomes.
Finally, I have a bonus insight for you. The strength of your senses is what makes you feel alive. Having dirty glasses, ears blocked by earwax, a loss of smell due to a cold, etc. always makes me feel like reality is less real. So it seems like sensory inputs is what ground us in reality (which may be why the numbening effects of dissociation makes reality feel like a game, movie or dream rather than reality). I hope these insights were useful! If you want, I will try to dig up the titles of some of the books I've read on this, though 40% of it is my own original ideas and guesses.
I know this feeling too. At the end of high school, around 2008 I had a friend confide in me his feelings of gender dysphoria (although he didn't word it that way, being before the whole transgender trend) thinking I shared them. Of course I didn't, but he must have taken my autistic personality traits to signal it. I wonder if others, like say antifa members, occasionally look at Proud Boys and recognize in them a shadow version of themselves.
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