athrelon

[athrelon]

Shot: Lol, China tries to tell the Dalai Lama who he can reincarnate as.

Chaser: 

The Dalai Lama apologized Tuesday for repeating remarks that if the next dalai lama were a woman, she should be "attractive." In an interview with the BBC, published June 27, the Dalai Lama was pressed on a comment he made in 2015 that if he were followed by a female dalai lama, she would need to be physically appealing." He reaffirmed his belief that beauty matters as much as brains. 'If a female Dalai Lama comes, she should be more attractive,' he told me while laughing," the BBC article said.

The Dalai Lama, who will turn 84 this week, told the BBC that inner and outer beauty are important in Buddhist literature, and stressed that he supported women's rights.

[athrelon]

One foreman said "you're laying brick, here's market wage."

Another said "you're in our wall-building internship, this'll look good on your resume."

Another said "you're building a cathedral, for free, for the exposure."

Nietzsche: he who has a “why” can ensure any “how.”

Normal person: how heartwarming, no matter how hard your life, faith can get you through!

Economist: huh, so there’s huge value in ginning up fake narratives to motivate your students and employees!

[athrelon]

For sale: Decline and Fall, never read

Picked up a bunch of books for a song at a local book sale.  As with pianos being available for near-free these days, this sort of thing is, as they say, quite a feel - adjacent to looting a lost civilization.  Almost literally so, as these cultural artifacts were once purchased by specific households that valued them but did not successfully transmit the valuing culture, and ended up letting them go for two orders of magnitude less than they paid.

[athrelon]

I keep reading thinkpieces about women feeling conflicted about the visceral appeal of a housewife’s life of childcare, cooking, and vacuuming.

For the career woman, it’s a real appel du vide.

#ba-dum-bump

[athrelon]

The strong voice as they will, the weak exit as they must.

[athrelon]

thoughts on Fall?

Gave up on novelty, rereading Diamond Age. You?

[athrelon]

Pride Month is fun and all, but I’m really looking forward to Wrath Month in a couple weeks.

[athrelon]

I’m confused by the Huawei chip ban.

The deal seems to be to, in the best case scenario, kill Huawei and secure 5G network infrastructure for America and/or a vassal state, in exchange for accelerating industrial policy to become independent of what was a comfortable American dominance of these industries.

Eliminating partial participation in 5G infrastructure in exchange for giving up a high-end chip manufacturing monopoly seems like a bad trade in the long run.

The move is simultaneously too much and too little. It's too much for narrow natsec concerns (Five Eyes seemed to be falling in line with a Huawei ban, although EU countries weren't playing along). It's too little to actually cripple the Chinese economy or even its ability to become independent in silicon, if appropriately motivated. And, of course, it supplies the motivation.  

It’s OPEC in the 1973 oil crisis, but for chips.

Presumably the chip ban is meant to kneecap Huawei/China's entire 5G capability in the short term, by which time it's hoped the 5G race will be over with - at the cost of conceding the chip monopoly in the long run.

The CIA must have some really juicy plans for 5G, or some bad short-termism is going on.

[athrelon]

Thoughts on tradcats

I find much to agree with in the traditional Catholic/Latin Mass fandom’s diagnosis of the problems with the modern Catholic church.  Sure, it’s a bit ironic that the ultra-Catholic response maps so neatly to the Reformation - a notably lay-driven movement pushing back against the innovating central authority, making good use of youth energy and new media.  My main concern, though, is the triumphalism, and the unmistakable stench of "who are we praying against" in the tradcat sphere.

There's a subtle "looking at the moon" vs "looking at the finger pointing to the moon" distinction in play. "Actually being traditional" looks very different from "being about being traditional," in the same way that neopagan LARPers are very different from actual historical pagans.

What would a 17th century French peasant village do if transported to the modern day?  Prayer, lots of shared secular rituals and social life, serious mutual aid, enforcing mainly ingroup norms. Refighting the 30 Years War or getting into “my liturgy can beat up your litugry” arguments with randos on the internet wouldn't even occur to them as things to do. Well, what are the internet tradcats doing?

Now, to be fair, Having Opinions about liturgy is probably a necessary first step. You’ve gotta gather the faithful first before they can do anything interesting, and using liturgy as your Schelling point is about as good as any other ingroup marker. But triumphalism merely because you got a fan club together is premature.  Triumph is when the people in your group have lived their distinctive lives so long they no longer notice that it's extraordinary.

(Ideally after fighting a guerrilla war with USG in the Western desert and doing well for yourselves, but still.)

To be clear, I'm glad the tradcat thing exists and I met some good people through the Ordinariate.  I wish them luck. But the brute fact is that the tradcat sphere is quite larval in development, certainly compared to historic or overseas Catholic communities, and they’ve even got quite a lot to learn from solid American Evangelical churches re: community building. Triumphalism now is paradoxically a sign of low expectations for what the tradcat movement can become.  I see much more being possible and encourage tradcats to raise their sights.

A less strongly held belief, but presented for your consideration: Tradcats claiming rhetorical ownership of the actually existing Catholic church (as distinct from just thinking of them as “people we’re in communion with”) are dumb, in the same way as naive conservatives cheerleading for USG because it's "our team." Rectification of names: you own at best your local communities. The remainder of the church may one day be reclaimed, but now considers you slightly embarrassing relatives.  You do not own it (yet, growth mindset.)

[athrelon]

On engineered love

One sometimes hears of experiments showing that merely by talking through a list of questions, people can be induced to fall in love.  But when you read it, the questions themselves aren’t that special, compared to the typical banter in a promising first date.

Rather, the active ingredient in these experiments is the high status authority figure (the experimenter) ordering the woman to engage in closeness-generating behavior, thereby shoving her shit-testing (and agency) out of the way to permit attraction to happen with the randomly assigned partner.  It’s Jim’s parentally enforced sexy dancing, with a lab coat on.  Or, if you like, it’s the Milgram experiment but for catching feelings!

It is, though, a nice illustration of how effective and noncoercive parental matchmaking could be.  At least, in a society where parents are accorded at least as much authority as students give to a literal RNG administered by a psychology grad student.

[athrelon]

Flaming hot take

Zhou Enlai, asked about his take on the French Revolution, allegedly responded, “It’s too soon to tell.”

Now, at last, it seems long enough to tell.

[athrelon]

Reading the Confessions

Augustine is the son of a devout Christian, but in practice claims to be, like his father, a typical late Roman pagan.  The striking thing, though, is how sheepish he is about it.  Sure, he goes to the arena, has a mistress, and thinks Jupiter is a cool dude.  But he’s instinctively sheepish about all of it; he’s ashamed when his mom runs into the mistress, he feels bad about joining his friends munching popcorn at the arena, he’s conflicted about how the great thunder-god could be running around having children outside wedlock.

Sure, he’s not sheepish enough about it to stop doing these things (”but not yet”). But the internal cringe is quite striking, and quite unlike what a red-blooded pagan self-confident in his worldview would think.  Indeed, it seems like his mind has been colonized by Christian ethical memes well before his formal conversion.  And perhaps this is not just him, but reflective of a broader milieu which, while many people were nominally pagan, that paganism was a crumbling edifice of unprincipled exceptions against the Christian morality which pretty much everyone believed in their bones.

Poignantly, it’s the exact same hollowing-out dynamic which today leads people to say “Oh, yes, I’m a Christian, but it sure is a shame how mean the Church is towards gays and divorced people...”

[athrelon]

I don’t know about the unique indigenous tradition of universalism bit, but it’s worth noting that the leading Chinese intellectuals in this period were literal cosmopolitans (Sun Yat-sen lived in Japan, Hawaii, and all through southeast Asia) frantically trying to ditch stale Chinese culture and figure out which part of Western culture to copy fastest.

Ultimately they, uh, settled on the Latin alphabet and Communism.

youtried.gif

a fun thing is how every nationalist thinks that their nation is victimized by being uniquely un-nationalist and victimizable by insidious foreign universalists. this is most common in white nationalists complaining about “white outbreeding” (white people lost their aasabiya by not fucking their cousins enough) in the stuff on nationalist elements in north korean ideology (uwu koreans are a smol cinnamon bun people… too gentle for this world, too easily victimized…) chronicled in the cleanest race, and so on.

[athrelon]

tfw you notice intrasexual competition but only have the language of racism/sexism to describe it.

“In a 2016 feature for The New York Times, Taffy Brodesser-Akner took note of this palpable dislike American women seemed to have simmering under the surface at a conference for the National Association of Professional Organizers (NAPO). While the women all had varying organizational methods, they were “fairly unified in their disdain for this Japanese interloper.” One member told Brodesser-Akner that Tidying Up is a good book only if “you’re a 20-something Japanese girl and you live at home and you still have a bunch of your Hello Kitty toys and stuff.” Brodesser-Akner notes this was not the only statement she heard during the convention that displayed an “aggressive xenophobia and racism” towards Kondo, but it was the only one appropriate enough to publish in the NYT.

Brodesser-Akner noticed many of the women felt they could’ve easily come up with Kondo’s methods, and were a bit begrudging about giving her her full due. It’s easy to see this thinking reflected today. Sarah Knight, author of the book The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a F**k, has made a lucrative platform off of being the antithesis to Kondo, copying everything from Kondo’s naming convention to cover design. “I too enjoyed Kondo but *mental* decluttering was largely unrepresented in her book,” wrote Knight on Twitter, ignoring that mental decluttering is the central tenet to Kondo’s ideology. Peter Walsh, from TLC’s Clean Sweep, went on the Rachael Ray show alongside Kondo to demonstrate his methods; the audience, a majority white women, seemed distinctly unimpressed with Kondo (needing to be coaxed to applause by Ray), but gave Walsh a wave of ecstatic sighs when he suggested you can store belts in a paper organizer.

There’s this sense that no one is actually listening to Kondo. She’s been reduced to an anime caricature, a fantasy creature who paradoxically both elicits dread and is easily dismissed because of her stature. White women writers found a way to profit off their collective disdain for her, and her intended meaning has just gotten buried and buried under think pieces repeatedly renumerating how wrong she is. She literally just wants to help people declutter so their physical belongings no longer take a mental toll on their well-being.”

[athrelon]

1997, Contact:  Although Arroway is a frontrunner to go, her hopes are scuppered by Christian philosopher Palmer Joss, a panel member whom Arroway met and briefly became romantically involved with in Puerto Rico. When he brings attention to her atheism, the panel selects Drumlin, as more representative of humanity.

2019: Senators Mazie Hirono (D-HI) and Kamala Harris (D-CA) raised concerns about membership in the Knights of Columbus while the Senate Judiciary Committee reviewed the candidacy of Brian C. Buescher, an Omaha-based lawyer nominated by President Trump to sit on the United States District Court for the District of Nebraska.Senators also asked whether belonging to the Catholic charitable organization could prevent judges from hearing cases “fairly and impartially.”In written questions sent to Buescher by committee members Dec. 5, Sen. Hirono stated that “the Knights of Columbus has taken a number of extreme positions. For example, it was reportedly one of the top contributors to California’s Proposition 8 campaign to ban same-sex marriage.”

[athrelon]

Rejected dark-n-gritty reboot

Oooooklahoma many times my honey and I'd wait For some stand-up man To hatch a plan To blow up an organ of the staaaate...

[athrelon]

Shot: In 1877 Li Hongzhang—a senior scholar-landlord-bureaucrat high in the confidence of the Qing court—joined forces with Tang Tingshu—a prominent, experienced, and wealthy treaty port comprador-merchant who had managed Jardine, Matheson's interests along the Yangtze—to establish a modern, industrial, large-scale coal mine in Kaiping, in Chihli. Li Hongzhang and Tang Tingshu faced unusual forms of opposition to their mining plans. Carlson quotes a British cable of 1882 stating that mining work had been stopped because Chi Shihchang, a vice-president of the Board of Civil Offices, had declared that "foreign mining methods angered the earth dragon... [and so] the late empress could not rest quietly in her grave" sixty miles away from Kaiping The Governor-General has been ordered to make inquiry and report... work has partially ceased.... Either he must throw over a company... formed with his direct sanction... [and] a very large quantity of capital, or he must... declare the mines harmless with the knowledge that he will then be considered responsible for any bodily ailment or other ill which may befall the Emperor or his family...

Chaser: But for all their enormous potential, A.I.-powered systems have a dark side. Their decisions are only as good as the data that humans feed them. As their builders are learning, the data used to train deep-learning systems isn’t neutral. It can easily reflect the biases—conscious and unconscious—of the people who assemble it. And sometimes data can be slanted by history, encoding trends and patterns that reflect centuries-old discrimination. A sophisticated algorithm can scan a historical database and conclude that white men are the most likely to succeed as CEOs; it can’t be programmed (yet) to recognize that, until very recently, people who weren’t white men seldom got the chance to be CEOs. Blindness to bias is a fundamental flaw in this technology...