Severino

Oxente

@selentelechia The main thing is that none of it’s new – the Episcopal Church has sharply broken with tradition for generations by now. Today’s exvangelicals are nothing compared to John Shelby Spong. Plenty of silent disapproval but it’s people who have been silently disapproving for 50 years

is it considered a positive development, relatively aligned with their values? a negative development that they are quietly unhappy with?

wonder how older Episcopalians feel about being one of the primary landing pads for traumatized (often queer) Christians who don't entirely leave the faith

@phl43 His opinions are regular leftist opinions that are bad in the way that leftist opinions are bad and he delivers them with some attitude, but nothing outside the pale. However if you’re familiar with his dog incident I think he’s at least somewhat sociopathic.

I have never listened to Hasan Piker speak on his podcast or read anything he's written. I'm not even sure he actually writes anything. I'm just assuming both that he isn't very interesting and that the pro-Israel brigade makes him sound crazier than he really is. I may or may not be right about that, but in any case, I'm pretty sure I'm right that it's not worth spending time to try to figure it out.

@suzania The irony is that Birmingham itself was founded as an industrial center far removed from the farming interests that originally dominated the state. Even the surrounding rural areas are more mining than farming areas.

Just came home to Manhattan and mentioned to my neighbor that I’d been in Birmingham, Alabama. He nodded, and said “I’ve never been… it’s quite agrarian, isn’t it? That state?”

@AltJenFitz @suzania Alabama is pretty middle of the road in terms of population density so not super rural. Lots of people living in big towns/small cities of 50k-500k, historically more small-scale industry than the rest of the Deep South. But no big cities.

@suzania Awkwardly put, but not entirely wrong.

@shagbark_hick @PaulNedelisky Your salvation depends, more precisely, on whether your sins are forgiven. And in gray areas, sin isn’t just about the legality of an action but also your conscience: are you trying to obey God’s Word to the best of your ability? (Cf. 1 Corinthians 8-10)

@severino205 @PaulNedelisky Your salvation does depend on whether or not you sin, however. And so we must ask: is it a sin to divorce? Is it a sin to use birth control? The Church has answers on these; other Churches seem to have conflicting answers, and so we must wonder if some lead people to sin.

The open secret is that the Bible actually isn't very hard to understand. Those who think they need an outside "decider" haven't realized this because--most likely--they aren't reading it for themselves.

@shagbark_hick @PaulNedelisky You don’t need a final answer for everything. Some things only get revealed to us in the new creation. Your salvation doesn’t depend on whether you worship on Saturday or Sunday.

@PaulNedelisky So what do you believe, then? Like do you believe in the Trinity, which is never mentioned in the Scriptures? Do you worship on Saturday, since Sunday worship isn't in the Bible? Do you "eat His Flesh and drink His Blood?"

@asymmetricinfo @RuxandraTeslo @mattyglesias The “over time” detail is the kicker here. Even in similar styles, buildings built over 20-30 years will make a place feel less Disneyfied than plopping a bunch of brand new buildings down at once.

@RuxandraTeslo @mattyglesias There are only so many lookbooks you can specify with any degree of detail so over time your town might come to look rather Disneyfied, plus the details are apt to multiply over the years until they become a blocker

Nice looking buildings > ugly buildings and if there are reasonable measures to encourage more beautiful buildings I am all for it, but I worry “YIMBY but only for nice buildings” is becoming a new version of “I’d be all for it if only the housing were ‘affordable.’”

@TheAnnaGat @tylercowen …you can make the case that the myth is all there is. There’s no reality to snap back to.

@TheAnnaGat @tylercowen I think there’s something to the self-creation founding myth, especially in regard to the western frontier. But it gets resolved differently. The story of the southwest, I’d argue, is creolization, adapting to and becoming defined by a new place. And in California…

Hard to write about the movie The Drama without giving away too much about its "big reveal", but it is both too excellent and too important to not review it. So I will try to avoid spoilers as best I can: First of all, it is very good. Much better than you think. 8/10. Go see it. One of those movies that reassure you that cinema / acting / photography / editing / writing / lighting etc is not dead. There is a general joy to watching a movie made by someone who loves everything about movies, and I felt that The Drama was made by someone like that. Every line, every prop detail, every one-line character has purpose, adds to the story. Rare level of mastery. I also felt that The Drama was simply the most romantic movie -- or the best movie *about love* -- that I'd seen since basically Punch Drunk Love. Despite the very different plots, the two are essentially about the same thing. Humans don't love perfection. Humans love humans. Mess is not the opposite but a kind of prerequisite of real love of any kind! Because of the movie's structure + its Scandinavian director, another work that will come to mind is the far less sunny Force Majeure -- another movie about a couple who have to figure out how or whether to go on after a big, ethically significant revelation about one of their characters. Mind you that these are THE big questions of human life, of human ethics, and they don't have tidy solutions. Ever. Why after 10 years we still talk about Force Majeure. Or why undergrads drive themselves crazy with the trolley problem... The fact that the other person is not a cookie-cutter example of catalogue perfection is the main theme of The Drama. Superficial critics bemoan that the movie starts so close to the main couple's wedding date and then takes place during the wedding. But that's the whole point! What is more roles and archetypes -- and cliche -- based than a wedding? And what is more American? Critics screamed about how race is not being discussed enough in this movie. But that is ALL that is being discussed! The whole movie is about *America*. The unspoken America. The "we don't talk about the Thing, we talk about another thing instead" America. It is a European director's exploration -- via a couple that is half American and half European -- of the very different culture that is America. As the movie opens, we have a stand-in for a couple: two seeds of a human being. Sketches. Promises. Cliches. The bride and groom marzipan on top of the cake. Are they really a couple? Are they human? They so don't have real personalities that they can't even write wedding speeches about each other! They have no idea about each other because in any real sense they do not exist. Then, when the truth blasts into their half-lives and the mess tsunami hits, that is just what they will have to become: humans. And the truth here is truly cringe, not sexy damage stuff, but shameful and low-class and violent and unintelligent. It's the stuff you hide and want to forget. And as the characters start throwing up on the nice carpets, and hairdos get messed up, and noses get bloodied, and sex becomes less video-ready, the director sees the American Dream fall apart, and real human beings emerge. What before was play-acting adulthood slowly becomes maturity. And it is not fun for either of them, mind you, because it's never fun for anyone. As a European, I was wondering if this is what we bring to American culture: a sense that real people are a mess -- uncategorizable, confusing, moving, and beautiful. That in a fundamental way, real people *make no sense*. We are not narratives, not coherent. If you want to love somebody, you must learn to love chaos. There is no polite belonging, only madness. Love is always a resistance, a rebellion, against the well-meaning advice of others. It is always, in a way, a bad decision. Only a European in America could ask the core question of this movie: How do you get to know people in America where everybody is self-created? How do you build relationships when it's so hard to tell who is real? Where everybody steps forth from no background to speak of, and you have to take them at their word? In a dialectical way, in this culture of individualism roles, legibility, and tribes rule -- but what is underneath that choice of costume? Is there anybody in there? And if you have found them, what do you do? The lovers in The Drama start out as such roles and catalogue models, Girardian copycats of how they think a couple should look and love. And only when unthinkably weird, unique things come to light about them -- things they cannot categorize, or even verbalize, let alone explain to themselves (or others) -- do they become real people. To jump to another Scandinavian: I felt this was a very Kierkegaardian take. On the one side, there is the ethics that is for your social group, an equalizer. And then there is the morality, which is only for you and those closest to you, exclusive and unfair and illegible. And you don't have to because you can't explain. Hegel said something like "rights begin where love (family) ends". And of course because this movie is Kierkegaardian it is a kind of reverse-Hegel. In The Drama, love begins where the rights (social roles and responsibilities) end. See when the crazy maid of honor tries to go all woke on the struggling couple -- who from any real friend would have gotten space, empathy, and some dark humor to help them through it -- and the woke diatribe just *doesn't work*! Dogma has nothing to do with real human connection, it just cannot even penetrate near it, because group ethics simply operates on a different layer of reality. (A few months ago I wrote a weird little essay about this american-innocence.com/p/private-king… -- about how one's private life can never be "democratic" in the political-philosophy sense, and that's for the better.) Just as in Punch Drunk, the relationship of the two humans in The Drama being at the end. Bloody, muddy, sweaty, and desperate, they can finally meet and look at each other, with all the masks off. And however tough this might be, it is surely much better than marrying a stranger! I understand that critics find this conclusion uncomfortable. Americans must be feeling very "seen" by this movie. But if you look closer, the mirror is not so unflattering. Under the self-creation and the trying hard to live well, you see strong and beautiful humans really doing their best.

@TheAnnaGat @tylercowen …with the ideal. The ideal isn’t an attempt to hide the darkness, though, and the honesty in the book depends on evoking the ideal earnestly instead of trying to poke holes in it.

@TheAnnaGat @tylercowen TKAM is actually a perfect example of the “masks” that I’m talking about that Euros get confused by (and that might not be exactly what you’re talking about). The idealized innocent small town childhood is integral to the book. The darkness is understood in tension…

@TheAnnaGat @tylercowen The “masks” that Americans wear aren’t attempts to hide the messiness. They’re part of the messiness! We’re aware of them and we wear them anyway. And those masks are part of our shared society.

@TheAnnaGat @tylercowen …Also as a Southerner, there’s no illusion of being self-made here. Your society (specifically its ills) defines you. Ironically, here the sense is that Scandinavians and esp. Germans are averse to human mess –the aversion to putting on airs results in conformity, need for order

@UrbanCourtyard A big part of it is that people don’t realize that much of Houston looks like this and think it’s all massive suburban lots. maps.app.goo.gl/yvaurWekfZN6Aw…

I think people freak out about Houston because no one wants American abundance to look *like that.* Everyone is hoping that 21st-century abundance can do better than Houston-style sprawl I am so fascinated by the late 19th century and early 20th century in Europe because they were dealing with a lot of the same urban housing pressures that we are, and they dealt with them by applying a very smart building code. This code allowed builders to go up five or six stories, build to the property lines, but they had to build with masonry and they had to leave the rear part of the lot open for a courtyard. This code helped these cities to grow by hundreds of thousands over a short time span. And the buildings were beautiful and livable, and are still standing today and are accounted some of the most valuable neighborhoods on the planet

@_derekmitchell_ @YIMBYLAND Jeb Bush is perhaps the canonical example here.

@YIMBYLAND If you send a WASP to South Texas then they’re gonna come back with a Hispanic immigrant significant other and strong opinions on chili con carne. Happened to me and then it happened to my brother. Many more such cases.

Come to South Texas and say that again with your whole chest.

@asymmetricinfo @mattyglesias @dilanesper And I think part of Catholicism’s appeal is that it’s institutionally strong enough to viably oppose American liberal elite institutions, which no Protestant church can say (maybe @aaron_renn has thoughts on this).

@asymmetricinfo @mattyglesias @dilanesper …includes aesthetics, history, and other things intellectuals ponder. But Presbys/Reformed pair all that with a focus on preaching. Liturgical mainline Prots haven’t seen conversions IMO because liberalism made them doctrinally incoherent,unable to do the every square inch thing