Dvorstone

@dvorstone 's limiting principle of stewardship: Do not mortgage, migrate, or sell what your grandchildren cannot reclaim.

It's honestly shocking how many people aggressively don't understand monasteries (or their modern proxies, such as leftwing activism or "spiritual retreats" and cults and even Islamic terror communities). Until the 20th century, monasteries were precisely a refuge for many uneducated, lower-class people looking for a refuge from the world. They were the "lay brothers." The educated monks who'd often become priests were "choir brothers," and Vatican II got rid of that distinction (among other reforms that gutted the monastic structure). Any healthy society NEEDS to provide some meaningful life for its entire population. Half of the U.S. population, for example, has an IQ under 100 and potentially any number of psychological or physical issues that make modern living hard. Historically, they'd be well-suited to monastic living but today, they'd be rejected. Alternatively, there were also entire "servant classes" that served a similar, non-religious function. These were people who were provided a strict, secure living, but one which didn't provide them the opportunity to marry or have a family. This allowed those people to have a dignified life that that was simple enough for them to excel in. We've made that economically impossible due to wage and labor laws. The benefits of such structures were many but one key one is that they didn't have children, thus reducing the birth rate of the lower classes. Today, we do the opposite. We give those people various forms of welfare and let them spend their lives idly breeding. The result is dysgenic and culturally corrosive. A culture follows what demographic is having children. The reason urban black culture came to dominate is that for that time period, they were the most demographically vigorous, i.e., they were having children. Welfare made that possible and proved catastrophic for American culture. Monasticism is simply one solution (for the spiritually inclined) for a more general problem: what do we do with low-aptitude people? Well, with AI tools, we're going to see the bar for aptitude creep up and more and more people will struggle to build a life. What will we do with them? Today, we offer them no meaningful life either in service to man, the state, or God. And guess what? Leftists know this and have sought to solve this problem with activism. The country is riddled with flophouses that function to provide meaning for people who can't function and succeed in society more broadly. Any loser can wander off and find a leftwing community that will take them in, feed and house them, so long as they accept their teachings and embrace their way of life. It is a mockery of monasticism but it serves a similar function. The comical gatekeeping of monastic living is absurd when you realize that people have romanticized it and tried to elevate it beyond what it was. Monasteries where were not filled with elites but often the lower classes looking for some life that they could actually manage.

It's not a "refuge from the world." It's a refuge from a part of the world. There is this weird impulse to gatekeep monastic living in precisely the same manner that the priesthood is gatekept, and that's an error. Monasteries are dying precisely because they're gatekept into oblivion. I'm not saying that monasteries are dumping grounds for the unfit, which seems to be what some think I'm suggesting. Rather, I'm saying that today, the rules that guide entry in to the monastery are too strict. The original Benedictine model was one where all monks did manual labor, and most were illiterate. That's since shifted to a more academic or scholarly monastery of today, which is why it has declined so much in the 20th century. The "lay brothers" were the traditional lower-class monks who primarily engaged in physical labor and took the three vows, whereas choir monks were the ones who primarily engaged in study, and who would often become priests. We've largely eliminated the "lay brother" category, and that's what we need to restore. The major reason was Vatican II, which eliminated the lay/choir distinction and forced the monasteries to be more engaged with the world. This basically eliminated their primary appeal: a strict social order, radical alternative to the normal world, and so on.

@dvorstone The religious life isn't meant to be a refuge from the world.

America need monasteries. What it has instead are cults and antidepressants. Life is hard, and not everyone is equipped to handle it, whether for temperament or aptitude or spirituality. We need somewhere that people can go and live simple but productive lives for as long as necessary. Our depressed and anxious shouldn't be medicated nor euthanized. They should be welcomed into a fulfilling life away from the struggles of modernity.

@lisavsworld I wouldn't go with the most abusive and corrupt model first, ha ha.

@dvorstone Wait, like... "Sixteen Tons" kind of company town?

The "company town" is greatly underappreciated. We should bring them back.

I propose a tax for companies that generate a lot of revenue but with very few domestic employees (either due to off-shoring or AI). Thus, the higher the ratio of revenue to domestic employees is, the greater the tax burden. Introducing the "Domestic Labor Balance Tax (DLBT)" Formula: T = τ × max(Ø, R - t₀ × E) Where: R = company’s annual gross revenue E = number of full-time equivalent domestic employees t₀ = baseline exempt revenue-per-employee threshold τ = marginal tax rate on excess revenue (e.g. 10%) Simply put, you can only generate so much money per domestic employee before you start getting taxed. Thus, it's better to lower prices or pay your employees more, or even higher more workers.

As a general rule, always get a second opinion. ALWAYS.

This kind of reasoning should result in the judge being immediately removed from the bench, and forbidden to practice law of any kind.

Matthew "Behold, I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves; so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves" This is the sin of willful imprudence, fueled by pride. The priest believed that he, through exposing himself to irrational and excessive risk, could inspire moral transformation in the wicked. There is the sin of the false-martyr. They believe that they can do as Christ did, but only God can change the heart of man. The West is exhausting itself via a total refusal to accept this fact; insisting that they, with money or politics or psychology (or exposing one's self to irrational risk, as the priest did) can do what only God can.

Someone should remind me to do a deep dive into this evil because it's probably worse than you think. This has some intense serial killer vibes.

Somewhere around 2016ish we found the first generation of women who genuinely, no irony or bullshit, believe that your husband should save the wife and not the children. This is probably the first time in human history

As I continually explain: Canada is a truly evil nation.

I don't think people truly understand evil, nor how close it is to ruling over them.

I don't like the LLMs for writing because, frankly, they're not very good. but what I LOVE them for is organizing information. I will often give them entire books, ask them to create a lesson plan from them (if I'm learning a skill) or similar, and then resubmit it to the LLM to check for hallucinations. They're really good at organizing information. So long as you remember to check for hallucinations, they basically can replace teachers. They're also pretty good at translating.

@dvorstone Last year I uploaded a book I wrote to Grok & asked for suggestions. It suggested I do things that I had already done and otherwise said things I would expect a movie supercomputer to say. But I know things are changing fast, so maybe I'll try the experiment again, just for fun.

Let us consider the housewife. Post-World War II American society underwent a series of interconnected transformations: 1. Industrialized convenience foods and appliances slashed domestic labor 2. Geographic mobility shattered extended-family networks 3. Public schools homogenized knowledge in favor of the workplace, and displaced women’s knowledge. This dismantled a vast, intergenerational body of practical, observational health expertise primarily held and transmitted by housewives. This knowledge included family-specific nutritional tweaks, seasonal recipe adjustments tuned to observed ailments, and even informal physical corrections for occupation-specific ailments. By replacing personalized, matrilineal “kitchen-doctoring” with processed uniformity, professionalized medicine, and workforce centered education, these changes diminished the housewife’s status from family health guardian to "optional assembler of corporate products." No wonder the relative status of a housewife collapsed, especially among women themselves (See Betty Freidan). This contributed significantly to the sharp, post-1950s rise in obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and other non-communicable illnesses. In short, housewives were keeping us healthy through invisible, centuries-honed care that no institution fully replaced. Housewives functioned as de facto nutritionists and healers. European and other traditions (fewer documented journals but you see this in many other cultures, most notably in India's Ayurvedic tradition and Japan's "ishoku dōgen") preserved this in recipe manuscripts that explicitly mixed dinner ideas with remedies, i.e., “this greens broth kept the kids stronger in winter.” Women observed family patterns from genetics and lifestyle (allergies, seasonal illnesses, energy levels) and adjusted recipes across generations, making accidental health hacking into “family tradition.” After WW2, wartime processing tech flooded civilian markets with TV dinners (1953), instant mixes, frozen foods, and later microwavable meals. These were marketed as scientific liberation from “drudgery,” freeing women for paid work or leisure. Appliances (ubiquitous washers, refrigerators, microwaves) further reduced visible skill. The outcome: home cooking time plummeted, ultra-processed foods rose to 50–70% of calories, and traditional knowledge was reframed as outdated “old wives’ tales” or dubious "folk wisdom." Homogenized industrial diets displaced personalized diets (which were admittedly limited to accessible foods so were by no means perfect, and general nutrition actually improved for most Americans after WW2, as many processed foods were fortified with missing nutrients and minerals). Modern nutrition research links this “nutrition transition” directly to higher risks of obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular death; all trends that accelerated precisely when scratch cooking declined. High postwar mobility amplified the loss. The GI Bill, suburban boom, car culture, and rising Social Security enabled young nuclear families to move to new subdivisions while retirees flocked to Florida (this started in the 1950s). Multigenerational households dropped sharply (from ~25% in 1940 to around 12% by 1980). Grandmothers, aunts, and uncles who once helped raise children and pass down nuanced recipes, remedies, and body-knowledge, were no longer daily presences. Oral transmission (watching Mom tweak a broth for Dad’s farmer’s back or a child’s sniffles) required proximity and distance turned it into occasional holiday lore at best. Historians note this postwar suburban/nuclear ideal isolated families from the very networks that preserved women’s practical wisdom. And then, there is public schooling. Pre-WWII “domestic science” (we know it as home-economics) curricula taught cooking, nutrition, sanitation, and basic caregiving; practical extensions of the very knowledge housewives held. Postwar, these programs were progressively de-emphasized, rebranded, or eliminated in favor of standardized, vocational training, which aligned with male-dominated domains (this was especially true of purely abstract academics in math and science). Feminist politics in the 1970s then aggressively pushed sidelined anything seen as “housewife training” in favor of "gender neutral" education. The curriculum shifted toward vocational training and dismissed so-called "folk wisdom." Intergenerational home learning; once reinforced by community and extended family; lost its institutional echo and social status. What was lost was this observational, adaptive knowledge women had refined over millennia. Gone was the “this spice settles my husband’s digestion after long days in the field,” in favor of formalized scientific knowledge. One great irony was that much of this so-called "folk wisdom" was a massive generator of testable hypotheses. It's no wonder that when this knowledge died, a lot of scientific progress (especially in medicine) stalled. But this extended to the domain of physical fitness as well. Before the allopath's (drug doctors) regulated their non-scientific rivals out of business, there was a huge industry that included not just dietary health but physical, and it was dominated by women. Consider, a community of miners or farmers would have familiar, repeated ailments. A housewife married to a farmer observed repetitive-strain patterns and developed practical corrections; things like herbal compresses, posture advice, gentle stretches, warm baths, or massages, which were all passed down through female lines. The same woman, had her husband been a later-generation desk worker, would have noticed sedentary issues (tight hips, rounded shoulders) and adjusted accordingly. Analysis shows women as the primary musculoskeletal caregivers, using manual techniques, movement cues, and remedies refined by close, long-term observation. The progenitor of modern physical therapy was folk-healing traditions. Without grandmothers or mothers-in-law nearby, and without schools transmitting this embodied knowledge, families lost these tailored interventions, resulting in widespread chronic pain and mobility issues that today require professional and expensive physical therapy. These changes, together, replaced a dedicated, low-cost, family-embedded health system of personalized, preventive, and adaptive care, run by a wife (or at a category of family women) with outsourced expertise and homogenized healthcare. The great irony is that the pursuit of "personalized" medicine and nutrition, driven by "big data" is trying to replace what was lost: the housewife and her support system. One of the things that big data systems (and AI) appear to be doing is restoring those lost feminine institutions, making it possible for women to once again take on the roles of personal doctor, nutritionists, physical therapist, and so on, for their families and communities.

We used to executive criminals and the depraved. Now we execute their victims.

@tardwife4life And men were barred from women's spaces, and also didn't have the vote. My point is that Islam is historically unique. It DOES offer every man some degree of authority over women.

I understand. Are you talking about strictly early Roman/Jewish Christians? Women have never been subordinate to individual men other than their husband or father, but on a societal level I think this was the norm. Women didn't have the vote, were barred from many professions and men's spaces.

It's very straightforward: 1. The central appeal of Islam is that it gives loser men access to, and authority or status over women. 2. Loser men in Christendom see this as more attractive than the demands of Christianity. Therefore, they smuggle Islamic sensibilities into Christianity and call it "based."

Actually no. One of the things about early Christians is that they were mostly women, and a big part of the reason is that being so gave them more choice in choosing a spouse. More so, Christianity implores women to submit to their husbands... but no one else. Islam dictates that women as a group are subordinate to men as group.

@dvorstone Didn't Christendom do #1 for its entire history until the 20th century?