Read this (very long) post from Scott Alexander, I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup, and its (very long) sequel, Five Case Studies on Politicization, and you'll understand most of the problems with the world.
There's definitely a "red tribe" and a "blue tribe". Red tribe is cultural conservatives and blue tribe is cultural liberals. And I fit in with the red tribe almost to a tee. I'm from rural Mississippi, I'm Christian, I was homeschooled, I'm a teetotaler, etc. I'm probably the most conservative demographic in America. And each tribe has an outgroup: the red tribe has both the blue tribe and outsiders, but somehow the blue tribe made the red tribe the only outgroup. His eventual conclusion is that liberals think conservatives are worse than ISIS at a gut level. Sadly, this is a lot of why I'm not liberal any more. I don't want to hang out with a crowd that thinks I'm worse than ISIS. And unfortunately, a lot of the left looks down on me because I'm from the wrong part of the country, I have the wrong accent, I go to the wrong church, I do the wrong things that the wrong people enjoy. No matter how liberal my political views were, they still saw that I was the wrong kind of person. Being a white evangelical homeschooled Mississippian on the left is like being a gay Muslim Mexican on the right.
The absolute worst thing for Christianity is for it to be identified with the red tribe. It's almost impossible to evangelize to blue tribe people. For this reason, I'd consider people like Nadia Bolz-Weber to be very important - she's a Christian pastor and about as blue tribe as they come. Meanwhile, the red tribe people are already sure they're Christian because they were born into the right family or they had a religious experience once when they were younger. It doesn't matter how they act. Most of my blue tribe Christian friends have quit the faith. They don't act very different from secular blue tribe people and there's not much incentive for them to stay if they live in a blue tribe bubble. If they want to stay in religion, they tend to go to more blue tribe-friendly religions like Wicca.
It's also horrible, like I mentioned above, for liberals trying to explain their views to people like me. There are some who accept me and don't look down on me, and I respect them a lot. But in my experience, most of them do look down on me and everything I love. I don't want to live in a big city, I don't want to eat organic everything, I don't want to see Hamilton, etc. And as I'll go into detail in the future, I hate snark.
One of the worst things about this election is that my red tribe, the people who think and act like me, went almost wholesale for Donald "Antichrist" Trump. If I was part of the blue tribe it wouldn't hurt so bad. I wish the red tribe got the sensible candidate and the blue tribe got the complete moron, like if it had been Marco Rubio vs. Bernie Sanders. Of course, most blue tribe people I know wanted Bernie anyway. Ironically they're the same people who wouldn't shut up about Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump all the time. And they were mad about having to vote for uncool Hillary instead of cool edgy Bernie.
Seriously, Scott Alexander's posts put a lot of my thoughts into words way better than I could. He comes from a completely different perspective but he comes to the same conclusions. Read them if you have the time, I don't know how to summarize them.
Friday, December 2, 2016
Thursday, December 1, 2016
I'm back after four years
So I let this blog lapse after a while. I may disable comments or I may not. I don't know. In the past four years I've gotten exactly one comment, so I probably will. For years I thought this blog was too angry and negative and I got ashamed of it. Then the election from hell hit and I got angrier and angrier. I decided I needed to blog again, then I remembered I had this old angry blog lying around, so I'm gonna revive it!
Some big changes:
Expect me to bitch about just about everything wrong with modern American culture. Don't expect too many answers here. I don't know if there are any, and if there are, nobody's listening anyway.
Some big changes:
- I got more conservative in the pre-Trump sense. In 2015 I was ready to vote Republican. Then the Antichrist (Donald Trump) hit and destroyed everything good on the right. Now I'm politically homeless. I would move further to the left again, but I despise the left almost as much as I despise the alt-right shitheads.
- I have a girlfriend now. So I'm going to post about some things I hid from everyone before. I didn't want to turn off single women by talking about some things. I'll ask her about the posts first to make sure she's fine with them.
- I let myself say "fuck" on here now because some things, like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, are hard to describe without the word "fuck".
- I quit identifying as "evangelical Christian" after the election because evangelicalism is apostate. I still believe the same. I still believe that Jesus saved me from my sins, that the Bible is inspired by God, and that Protestants are generally right. I just think evangelicalism has lost its mind completely. I still want to be the best Christian I can. I suck at it horribly of course. I have a bad temper and I hate it. Plus a lot of people would doubt my salvation because I say "fuck" and "shit" and other bad words. (Fact: I never used a swear word until I was 19.)
- I also lost any respect for the "reason logic fact science evolution fuck" militant atheist crowd. People like Bill Maher, PZ Myers, Richard Dawkins, etc. I can't even read Neil DeGrasse Tyson any more without responding "reason logic fact science evolution fuck" because THAT'S ALL THEY SAY. I wish the militant atheists supported Trump and the evangelicals were against him. Atheists face prejudice, so I want to make it clear that most atheists are fine with me, even if most of them supported Bernie Sanders (the substitute God for secular America). It's the minority of annoying ones I'll go after.
- I quit caring if I offend people or not.
- I said nice things about the Occupy movement? Seriously?!?! Those people are the Tea Party of the left. Those people got us Bernie fucking Sanders, the second worst major candidate in recent memory.
Expect me to bitch about just about everything wrong with modern American culture. Don't expect too many answers here. I don't know if there are any, and if there are, nobody's listening anyway.
Sunday, August 26, 2012
iPod and iPad in Spanish
WARNING: International Phonetic Alphabet ahead. I try to make it easy for people who don't know IPA, which is most of you, and people who don't see the symbols. IPA makes this kind of discussion way easier.
There are only two things I wanted to find online that I couldn't: 1. Train schedules for the railroads in my town and 2. How Spanish speakers pronounce "iPad" and "iPod". I did a bunch of searches for the second thing and couldn't find anything.
Apple's iPad has the worst product name ever. It sounds like "iPod" with an annoying accent. In fact, most languages don't distinguish the vowel /æ/ in "iPad" from the vowel /ɑ/ in "iPod". Most of them merge them together into /a/, which sounds similar to /ɑ/. So I asked my Facebook friends. They said it's "like in English". This doesn't help me. The English pronunciations are /aipæd/ and /aipɑd/, and Spanish would merge them both into /aipad/. Spanish spelling suggests /ipað/ "ee-pahth" and /ipoð/ "ee-pohth".
I found a page about how Japanese speakers say iPad and iPod. They say /aipad/ for "iPad", which sounds more like "iPod" to me, and /aipod/ or /aipoud/ for "iPod", which sounds like "eye-pode". This is interesting because Japanese doesn't allow "d" at the end of a syllable. Japanese syllables only end with a vowel or "n".
So I asked two actual Spanish speakers in person. They both told me they pronounce it "like in English", /aipad/ and /aipad/. (Final /d/ may have been /ð/ because final /d/ in Spanish always becomes /ð/.) One may have been /aipɑd/, but I definitely did not hear /aipæd/ or even /aipɛd/ or /aiped/. So they basically say them the same.
The final lesson: Apple doesn't respect people who don't speak English. Gives me less reason to respect Apple.
There are only two things I wanted to find online that I couldn't: 1. Train schedules for the railroads in my town and 2. How Spanish speakers pronounce "iPad" and "iPod". I did a bunch of searches for the second thing and couldn't find anything.
Apple's iPad has the worst product name ever. It sounds like "iPod" with an annoying accent. In fact, most languages don't distinguish the vowel /æ/ in "iPad" from the vowel /ɑ/ in "iPod". Most of them merge them together into /a/, which sounds similar to /ɑ/. So I asked my Facebook friends. They said it's "like in English". This doesn't help me. The English pronunciations are /aipæd/ and /aipɑd/, and Spanish would merge them both into /aipad/. Spanish spelling suggests /ipað/ "ee-pahth" and /ipoð/ "ee-pohth".
I found a page about how Japanese speakers say iPad and iPod. They say /aipad/ for "iPad", which sounds more like "iPod" to me, and /aipod/ or /aipoud/ for "iPod", which sounds like "eye-pode". This is interesting because Japanese doesn't allow "d" at the end of a syllable. Japanese syllables only end with a vowel or "n".
So I asked two actual Spanish speakers in person. They both told me they pronounce it "like in English", /aipad/ and /aipad/. (Final /d/ may have been /ð/ because final /d/ in Spanish always becomes /ð/.) One may have been /aipɑd/, but I definitely did not hear /aipæd/ or even /aipɛd/ or /aiped/. So they basically say them the same.
The final lesson: Apple doesn't respect people who don't speak English. Gives me less reason to respect Apple.
Tuesday, June 26, 2012
Comments!
I enabled comments on new posts now. I have to enable them on the old posts by hand. There's still some I don't want comments on, but I decided there's no point in not having comments when half of my posts start discussions with my friends anyway. I am a sellout.
Another long rant on politics, religion, personality, and forgiveness
I told some of my friends a few days ago that I feel like I get more conservative every day. It's not based on the beliefs, it's based on the lifestyles and the arguments. I explained that I understand conservatives even when I disagree with them, but I don't understand liberals when I disagree with them. So I have more sympathy for conservatives who say stupid stuff than for liberals who say stupid stuff. My conservative and libertarian friends were happy and my liberal friends were not. One of my liberal friends, who I respect a lot, accused me of confirmation bias. Which is probably true. Everyone's more likely to believe something they already agree with. I also said I like to fit in with people who are like me. Most people are like this. No matter how good liberal arguments are, they won't win me over because I like small towns and I don't drink. Stereotypical, but more true than it should be. And as I've said before, religious liberals have more in common with secular liberals than they do with religious conservatives. I may have liberal opinions on some things, but I have a conservative brain. So conservative arguments make more sense.
My Christian faith makes me more moderate or liberal than I would be otherwise. A lot of my liberal opinions go against what logic tells me. For me, logic supports conservatives more often than not. When I was in college I was both a hardcore Christian and a hardcore liberal, and I was every bit as obnoxious as the Religious Right. I disagreed with the left on a few things but I liked the way they talked. As I explained in a ha-ha-only-serious post on religion and politics last year, liberal arguments are similar to religious arguments. And both groups can slip into self righteousness real easily.
It really bugs me when some secular people, usually secular liberals, try to claim Jesus agreed with them. It bugs me when people claim Jesus was a socialist, a capitalist, a Republican, a Democrat, a Libertarian, a monarchist, etc. I also don't know why someone who rejects Jesus's supernatural claims would follow Jesus's morals. They're not practical at all. There are other moral teachers. It's a lousy attempt to try and win over Christians. I respect other religions and philosophies too much to cozy up to their followers. Too bad not everyone's that way.
For example, I don't understand why so many secular people are so pro-forgiveness. If I left Christianity that's the first thing I'd throw out. I honestly don't understand forgiveness. I never have. I think it perpetrates evil. It prevents evil from being punished. It keeps the forgivers subordinate to the forgiven. I guess I should be glad most people aren't as vindictive as me, but I don't understand it. Non-Christians usually tell me I'm a horrible person. Christians either do the same or admit they have no answer to my questions. I want to be more forgiving, but forgiveness makes no sense!
But once again I have a conservative brain. There's a lot of liberal arguments against Christianity, but very few conservative arguments, and the conservative arguments are the only ones that make sense to me. They reflect the way I see the world, which makes sense to me. And in the US nearly all conservatives are Christian. Whether they follow Christian morals or not is another matter, but they call themselves Christians, so they claim Christian teachings and morals as their own.
There's a book I want to read called The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided By Politics And Religion by Jonathan Haidt. I've read the first few chapters and I like it so far. It covers a lot of the same ground as some of my blog posts, only more positive and from a very different perspective. Haidt is a psychologist. He's also a former liberal turned moderate by his research into morality. Maybe he can help me make sense out of the world. The world looks absurd to me. My own half-baked theories make more sense than most of what I see out there. And when things seem to make sense, they always exclude me and say I can't exist.
My Christian faith makes me more moderate or liberal than I would be otherwise. A lot of my liberal opinions go against what logic tells me. For me, logic supports conservatives more often than not. When I was in college I was both a hardcore Christian and a hardcore liberal, and I was every bit as obnoxious as the Religious Right. I disagreed with the left on a few things but I liked the way they talked. As I explained in a ha-ha-only-serious post on religion and politics last year, liberal arguments are similar to religious arguments. And both groups can slip into self righteousness real easily.
It really bugs me when some secular people, usually secular liberals, try to claim Jesus agreed with them. It bugs me when people claim Jesus was a socialist, a capitalist, a Republican, a Democrat, a Libertarian, a monarchist, etc. I also don't know why someone who rejects Jesus's supernatural claims would follow Jesus's morals. They're not practical at all. There are other moral teachers. It's a lousy attempt to try and win over Christians. I respect other religions and philosophies too much to cozy up to their followers. Too bad not everyone's that way.
For example, I don't understand why so many secular people are so pro-forgiveness. If I left Christianity that's the first thing I'd throw out. I honestly don't understand forgiveness. I never have. I think it perpetrates evil. It prevents evil from being punished. It keeps the forgivers subordinate to the forgiven. I guess I should be glad most people aren't as vindictive as me, but I don't understand it. Non-Christians usually tell me I'm a horrible person. Christians either do the same or admit they have no answer to my questions. I want to be more forgiving, but forgiveness makes no sense!
But once again I have a conservative brain. There's a lot of liberal arguments against Christianity, but very few conservative arguments, and the conservative arguments are the only ones that make sense to me. They reflect the way I see the world, which makes sense to me. And in the US nearly all conservatives are Christian. Whether they follow Christian morals or not is another matter, but they call themselves Christians, so they claim Christian teachings and morals as their own.
There's a book I want to read called The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided By Politics And Religion by Jonathan Haidt. I've read the first few chapters and I like it so far. It covers a lot of the same ground as some of my blog posts, only more positive and from a very different perspective. Haidt is a psychologist. He's also a former liberal turned moderate by his research into morality. Maybe he can help me make sense out of the world. The world looks absurd to me. My own half-baked theories make more sense than most of what I see out there. And when things seem to make sense, they always exclude me and say I can't exist.
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