You know that moviemaking trick, I dunno what it's called but you stack two kinds of lenses and zoom in with one while zooming out with the other, so the focal subject stays in one place and the background seems to move?
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Prosperous, connected citizens of advanced countries are subjected to less and less evil while able to perceive more and more of it. This creates a sort of moral vertigo. Lots of stuff is fucked up but people used to torture cats to death for public entertainment, so
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(This isn't whiggism: it's not a given things will *continue* to improve)
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Replying to @sonyasupposedly @sonyaellenmann and
This is part of his essay, no? We do better on measurable things, and so cheer how well we measure up; yet horror trails us through every haunted street like a starving dog. What can be measured matters, but diverse thinkers come back again and again to our nameless, vacant loss.
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OK I went back and actually read the essay, comments withdrawn but I do still have a contrary take. I think churches are pretty much the last remnants of a whole set of civil institutions that did this.
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Replying to @St_Rev @TheAgeofShoddy and
St. Rev ☯️ 🏴 😻 Retweeted
Mutual societies, Masonic-type clubs and other organizations of what
@Scholars_Stage recently called democracy as a way of life/self-government (https://twitter.com/Scholars_Stage/status/1061420430962188289 …) were slowly crowded out and basically dead by 1970. We barely remember them.St. Rev ☯️ 🏴 😻 added,
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Replying to @St_Rev @TheAgeofShoddy and
Churches a) had a special advantage under the 1st amendment, so lasted longer, b) allied w/were taken over by social activism, which gave them a new set of purposes while undermining their old ones. I think the association of "what we've lost" with "faith" is somewhat spurious.
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Replying to @St_Rev @TheAgeofShoddy and
"Churches are bad, we need more Masonic Lodges" is my favorite hot take right now
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Good dunk, but I'm saying that churches are the surviving remnant -- partly because they're explicitly protected under the constitution -- of a much richer set of institutions that died out. Pre-Roosevelt labor unions would be another example.
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. Banned in Sweden. SubGenius, Zhuangist, white-hat troll. Defrocked mathematician. Brain problems.