smoke-in-the-wind

[smoke-in-the-wind]

i know the reproduction stuff is a problem and hopefully with the right incentives, cheap housing and less emphasis on college educaiton and credentialism we can reverse it and have a stable population BUT when people claim its an unfixable result of the sexual revolution i feel like...idk, when you read about premodern societies, women are just...totally inseparable from their capacity to bear child. like, they do other stuff of course. but this capacity is just so overhwlemingly emphasized, its EVERYWHERE in a way its just not anymore. and god, one generation where women got to live as like, full people would be worth the extinction of the race. i know that sounds hyperbolic, its not true like...hedonically, utiliarianly. but i think its true in terms of...inherent human dignity

[smoke-in-the-wind]

"bring back patronage lol" i can't emphasise enough how much of renaissance patronage was like a souped up version of constantly networking. and if you fucked it up the catholic church might put you under house arrest for saying the earth moves around the sun.

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I feel like many people study philosophy and then suddenly have a "breakthrough" where they feel like they can produce vast amounts of new rigidly structured knowledge that no one has ever considered before and unfortunately the term for this phenomenon is "psychosis"

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i complain a lot more on here than I do irl, and for that I apologize

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People talk a lot about apocalypse fiction, and post-apocalypse fiction, and post-post-apocalypse fiction, but there's a real sweet spot of mid-apocalypse fiction where it's very clear that the world is ending but a lot of people are still just going to their nine-to-five jobs anyway.

[smoke-in-the-wind]

I obviously have my rational reasons for being annoyed with them, but a big reason why things like tarot or ghost stories (that people take seriously, I love the fun kind, I’m not a complete buzzkill) annoy me is that the way they function is almost exactly like all the stories of “miracles” I grew up on. And those kinda fucked with my head, kept me religious a lot longer than I would’ve otherwise been. So it does piss me off a bit when people get to act all anti-religious but take that seriously.

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one of the things about (mostly evangelical) christian culture people don’t talk about is angel stories. I remember growing up and everyone had at least one of these. They’re in a pickle and someone appears out of seemingly nowhere, helps them out, then disappears. All in all, they function almost exactly like ghost stories in wider society, just those are usually frowned upon.

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Adonai is actually used as a pretty interesting character throughout the texts of the Hebrew Bible. Much less tamed and knowable than the gods in the Greek canon, his brutal means is often made complex by his opaque ends. He disappears then reappears throughout the canon without clear cause. His monotheism is both a means of power (there’s no equal brings) and of of impotence (he has no family connections). He shows clear favouritism, but his chosen elect are often burdened by their relationship to him. And again and again the texts force the reader to ask “why is omnipotence so jealous?”

[smoke-in-the-wind]

IQ and MBTI are similar in the sense that something is certainly being measured, but it’s really not what’s being claimed. Both intelligence and personality seem like highly suspicious concepts, and while you can apply hard definitions to make them more workable, these would likely be much more dynamic and environmentally derived than any objective test could measure.

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can you imagine if "the gays" were like. obsessed with the Hindu caste system. instead of astrology.

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you idiots need to stop saying versions of "only white people hate a pseudoscience that categorises people based on the position of the stars" how are you unironically assigning whiteness to critiques of astrology. was it whiteness when activist narendra dabholkar opposed superstition to the extent that it got him fucking murdered? do you think he opposed astrology because he was just one of those westernised guys? you think only white people oppose biological determinism? fuck off with the benevolent racism

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if you could distill some purely animalistic instinct to go to the extreme end of something (you know, in the way prey animals can't control themselves when the flight response kicks in or how hunting dogs will do exactly what you expect them to when they see a squirrel booking it or whatever), could you call that competitiveness? can wanting to go beyond "best" or "most" in any given endeavor count as a competition? do you have to be conscious of wanting to outdo yourself in order to be competitive?

[smoke-in-the-wind]

middle class is fun cause they’re self-cannibalizing by necessity. they hate inflation, yet their growth is the primary cause of it. They are the ouroboros on which economic cycles rest upon

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annoying that population fluctuations is a large factor in market health. we need to some stable variables

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a lot of the major things Marx got wrong or was just weird about (like calling his theory scientific or the falling rate of profit) were just common 19th century errors. which 1) means we should judge Marx a little less harshly for this and 2) judge contemporary marxists more when they hold on to these beliefs (which tbf not all do)

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if I’m rambling it’s because I have just given blood btw

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hmm. There’s this common idea that people are getting more ignorant. but this seems…unlikely? Random fluctuations over the past 5 years or so seem possible, but the notion that intelligence is decreasing overall doesn’t seem to have a real data backing it? Surely it’s just that people are more likely to hold and express their opinions than before, and unfortunately many of these opinions are uninformed. But if you believe in the core concepts of democracy, surely you would want people to have more opinions! Ideally, we would want an increase in opinion to coincide with an increase in accurate information, which doesn’t seem to be happening, but this is different than the usual claim that accurate information is decreasing, not just stagnating, which I don’t think is true.