Oceans Yet to Burn — thathopeyetlives: mitigatedchaos: ...

thathopeyetlives

Actually, what does Satan derive from the foolish alignment of Westboro Baptist Satanists?

(i.e. very un-Satanic satanists)?

mitigatedchaos

I’m not entirely sure what’s being asked here, but it sounds like it might be a good question.

thathopeyetlives

Does Satan get anything out of people who profess to like him and worship him but who actually act in a consistently un-Satanic way and display some of the virtues, which confound and attack him?

mitigatedchaos

That does actually sound like a good question.

(However, I cannot intuitively model existing in a world where Satan is real and focused on spreading anti-virtue. It doesn’t really make sense to my brain on a deep emotional level, much like I can only understand other sexual orientations academically.)

Presumably, they are still Damned (which meets Satanic goals?) by Christian standards. Indirectly, they would also weaken the association of the Great Adversary with evil and thus open up paths for conversion by those who would otherwise see flat evil and resist.

I will admit though that I’m enamored with the idea of evil creatures doing good (through either will or contract), and of using evil means to achieve good, and with fake things becoming (effectively) real. Something inside me just finds such things cool or satisfying.

religion

More you might like

If I might make a charitable interpretation of @sinesalvatorem Community posts, here…

Let’s suppose our goal is to get religious communities to tolerate LGBT people, maybe by becoming less religious or maybe by just being less fundamentalist about it. (And this sort of thing isn’t just religious in origin.)

It makes sense to know just what it is we’re asking them to give up.

Religion actually is a social technology. Coal is an energy technology. That doesn’t mean soot is good for you.

If a non-religious or religious-but-tolerant community can be designed and instantiated, then exiting from previous non-tolerant religious communities has a much lower cost. (Plus there is the issue of everything else society needs.)

religion politics sinesalvatorem

dedicating-ruckus

elementarynationalism

Militant atheists have won a lawsuit demanding a First World War memorial cross erected by the American Legion has to be torn down from public land because muh separation of church and state.

Yeah no, the new atheists are going in the camps first.

jeremyvyoral72

This is just so sad. For any atheists out there, why? I understand the separation of church and state, but the American legion is not government, it is a private organization. Why attack a memorial to the dead erected by a private charity that has did for so many years? It just makes you look like an ass.

awhiffofcavendish

Self righteous superiority complex.

gouachevalier

“So, this week it’s Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson is coming down. I wonder is it George Washington next week and is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You know, you really do have to ask yourself where does it stop?“
–President Trump

Leftists sure do enjoy proving their opponents right, don’t they?

higher-order

And people wonder why Atheists are hated.

mitigatedchaos

Athiests are, as far as I can tell, right about the whole “no God” thing. It certainly makes a lot more sense WRT bad things happening to good people than any religious explanation does, and doesn’t have the whole problem of Hell thing.

You usually have to combine Atheism with something else to get this course of action, though. Like Leftism, or so on.

The thing is, people who were abused by religion, or under religious pretenses? They are going to HATE religion. So long as religion abuses or is used as a pretense to abuse people, you are going to get these kinds of reactions.

And they typically don’t agree with the religious on what morality is, so just sticking to the religious morality more strictly isn’t going to sort it.

dedicating-ruckus

Whenever atheism so called achieves footholds of significant power in society, it seems to spawn for itself noxious combining ideologies (Jacobinism, Communism, &c.) that then take the blame for the resultant atrocities. It’s possible that atheism is not in fact the ultimate root cause, but this degree of correlation seems to require some explanation.

As for abuse, it’s certainly interesting that this is a major focus of discussion here, and not for any number of other societal institutions that have some arguable causal connection to individual abuse cases. For that matter, if you compared practicing religious with nonreligious, would you actually find individual abuse any higher? My intuition says that abuse should be higher among the latter, but I haven’t seen numbers on this topic specifically. Overall, though, I think that “abuse” is a red herring meant to legitimize attacks on religion just because it is religion.

And in this particular case… Does anyone actually think that further escalation in tearing down our formerly shared symbols and destroying our erstwhile binding national identity is a good thing?

mitigatedchaos

Whenever atheism so called achieves footholds of significant power in society, it seems to spawn for itself noxious combining ideologies (Jacobinism, Communism, &c.) that then take the blame for the resultant atrocities. It’s possible that atheism is not in fact the ultimate root cause, but this degree of correlation seems to require some explanation.

You want an explanation?

Atheism is simple. It’s obvious. It doesn’t contain much information. “Why do bad things happen to good people?” “Because there is no one powerful enough and willing to stop them.”

But because it doesn’t contain much information, because it’s mere non-belief, it can only achieve widespread support in societies that are religion-dominated by riding on some other, more powerful, more viral ideology which displaces the main one - and those kinds of displacements tend to be a lot more violent.

Atheism doesn’t tell you what values you should have. The other ideology does, and uses the Atheism as a means to attack the legitimization of the previous ideological power structure.

“Atheism causes atrocities” has the causation backwards.

As for abuse, it’s certainly interesting that this is a major focus of discussion here, and not for any number of other societal institutions that have some arguable causal connection to individual abuse cases. For that matter, if you compared practicing religious with nonreligious, would you actually find individual abuse any higher? My intuition says that abuse should be higher among the latter, but I haven’t seen numbers on this topic specifically. Overall, though, I think that “abuse” is a red herring meant to legitimize attacks on religion just because it is religion.

Look, the attitude here is “HOW DARE THOSE ATHEISTS BE SO AGAINST RELIGION?”

The OP says “the new atheists are going in the camps first.”

Now, he’ll say he was just memeing or whatever, but the underlying emotion about it, about how anyone could be so against religion, they must be evil, is there.

But the Atheists see religion in ways similar to how a number of people see some forms of Communism - an oppressive ideological machine that uses and discards human beings for its own ends, composed of many interlocking components.

They want to destroy all reverence for religion like some right-wingers want to destroy all reverence for Communism, because each bit sacredness contributes some small measure of power to the aura of uncriticizability that gave religion its power in previous eras.

Many of them see it that way for reasons not so different from why some of those right-wingers hate Communism so much - it was used to excuse or legitimize violence against them.

So as long as that’s happening, you don’t need to have people be tools of the Devil to run around wanting to tear down crosses. Unless, of course, you consider those doing the abuse to be tools of the devil - but then you wouldn’t be sending the Atheists to camps, ne?

And in this particular case… Does anyone actually think that further escalation in tearing down our formerly shared symbols and destroying our erstwhile binding national identity is a good thing?

Cross memorials? No. Not a blanket on stone monuments though - no Ten Commandments for courthouses.

Source: elementarynationalism politics perpendicular wood

dedicating-ruckus

mitigatedchaos

@dedicating-ruckus

That’s an interesting idea. I suppose here it serves a similar purpose as philosophical skepticism; acting as universal acid, it attacks the philosophical justification of the existing system, letting the new movement come in and take power based on no philosophical justification other than “because I have all the guns”.
The next consideration is that believing things (in general) is actually good, and a philosophical universal acid is therefore a bad and noxious thing.

You don’t need Theism to believe in things. Theists are generally the ones who claim that you do, seeing as their belief system works that way.

The other problem is that Atheism is most-likely just plain true. Its prediction - “there will be no divine intervention” - pretty accurately describes the world we all live in. Every instance theists cite is unclear or not sufficiently provable - which is exactly what you would expect from someone whose god isn’t real that has to make excuses for something that’s supposed to be all-powerful.

Worse, the reasoning used is “don’t test God, you have to show faith.” That sets off my internal memetic defense intuitions something fierce.

That’s setting aside how unforgivable the entire Hell thing is. And that’s what really gets me more than the rest of it, seeing as it’s so incongruent with “ultimate perfect good.”

Some conceptions of Ultimate Perfect Good could look pretty fucking alien, but they wouldn’t look like that.

Now usually, I let religious belief slide for what you might call Utilitarian reasons - some people use it to keep themselves out of jail, others to keep themselves alive, there are various charity things, and so on.

Plus farther back there were things like monks copying and preserving texts. Overall, I’d say it’s difficult to determine the net moral impact of religion.

But then we get to things like “we’ll be cheering putting the New Atheists in camps,” and I feel the need to prod back a bit.

(also, worth asking why ~every stable and non-atrocity-generating power structure in history has used religion of some kind as part of its base.)

Now see, I know this must be bullshit, but I’m not enough of a culture warrior to give a firm rebuttal.

However, first you have to consider that most of human history is religious, therefore you’re limited to stuff from, essentially, the 1700s onward, otherwise there’s a massive selection bias.

Then there’s the fact that many of the “religious-based” structures also committed atrocities - unless you selectively handwave away the Divine Right of Kings type stuff.

And then you can count something like America as having committed atrocities and not being religious on the grounds of the founders’ Deism being closer to Atheism than other belief structures were at the time, but then you can’t count it as stable and religiously-rooted in opposition to all those medieval wars of succession.

I strongly suspect there’s going to be strategic equivocation of that kind somewhere in any such argument.

This is where there’s a bait and switch happening.
I’ve seen the anecdotes from people abused under a religious justification. I don’t begrudge these people their bad impressions of religion in general, even thinking they’re mistaken. I also don’t believe for a moment that the real driving force behind major societal-level pushes like this one is actually people who were abused and therefore have an instinctive animus. There aren’t enough of them. And the message behind these societal pushes is not “we must disempower religion because it led to these concrete abuses” (except occasionally, from a very few people, as a motte). It’s some mix of “we must destroy religion for its own sake” and “we will define this perfectly-okay thing as an abuse, then use it as an excuse to tear down religion”.
The people behind this by and large don’t have any such concrete and morally-justifiable motivation for their advocacy. They’re attacking religion for its own sake and/or because it’s in the way of their powermongering. We are called to love our enemies, but it’s with relation to this that I can sympathize with the urge to shove them in camps.

Oh come on, like those instances aren’t supposed to be able to motivate others?

You surely don’t think all anti-Communists are supposed to be those who personally suffered under Communism, do you?

And besides, some of those “perfectly okay things” really aren’t so okay.

Source: elementarynationalism politics perpendicular wood

dedicating-ruckus

mitigatedchaos

@dedicating-ruckus

In order to believe in objective moral facts, you end up needing some kind of theism. (Not necessarily Christianity, or any other specific variant.) Without it, the only rational grounding you can give for any moral claim will boil down to “because I feel like it”. This can work for individuals (though probably only if they’ve internalized the moral system of a surrounding theistic society), but good luck getting it to pass stably across generations.

I could go one of three ways on this.

Theists don’t actually believe in something objective. They’ve tricked themselves into thinking they do.
Of course that’s what a Theist would say.
If we’re being aggressive about it, it boils down the same way for theists.

Either non-theists can believe in objective moral claims, or theists can’t believe in objective moral claims. Gotta be one or the other.

Then of course, there’s the matter of why should finding the ultimate secular morality be easy? Physics isn’t easy. Chemistry isn’t easy. Mathematics, which isn’t a natural science, isn’t easy.

I’m not sure what your background is like here. You don’t ordinarily seem the type to go off from a position of ignorance, but it’s in fact fairly universal in my experience that vocal internet atheists don’t actually have any understanding of theological arguments.
These arguments basically have the same counter, which is that free will is actually really important, and God does not violate it. By humans’ free will, sovereignty over the material world passed to the Devil, “prince of this world”; this, in short form, is why bad things happen to good people. Similarly, Hell is identified with the state of willing rejection of God; He desires that everyone be saved, but this can’t happen absent the individuals’ decision to accept salvation.
This is a topic that could support (has supported, even) an arbitrary length of arbitrarily detailed argument, which I am surely not the best one to make. Since diving full-speed into theodicy would be fairly tangential to the original question, I’ll not continue along this vein.

“Free Will” is a cop out, and free will has always been a cop out.

Don’t posit beings of infinite power and then make excuses for them not to use that power.

Look, inside you, when you make a decision, that decision must be made somehow. If there is no somehow, then it is random. If there is a 1:1 fixed somehow, then it’s deterministic. If it’s somewhere in-between, probabilistic, then it’s a weighted random.

If you’ve got infinite power, then you’ve got time and resources for infinite mind engineering. If you decide not to bother with that engineering, then the outcome is arbitrary and therefore random. That’s not the kind of freedom you’d need to make to justify Hell.

Either way, you’re going to have a hell of a time, so to speak, getting infinite moral liability to stick to finite agents that were made by someone else who could have made the very laws of reality different but didn’t bother for some reason.

One could posit that God cannot imagine a universe without creating it, but that is not what religion teaches. One could posit that hell is temporary and you’re only there until you change your mind, or that only those who will never ever change their minds will go there, but that isn’t what religion typically teaches.

I’m not going from significant research here either, just general historical knowledge. To formalize my hypothesis a bit, I would say that every time a movement that is ideologically atheist has attained societal control, atrocities have followed on the part of that movement.
This doesn’t make any statement about the behavior of religious governments and power structures; clearly these have also committed atrocities historically. By this standard, I would say that the US has never qualified as atheist (despite getting closer over the late 20th century).

Ruling out religious governments and power structures is cheating.

This hypothesis would suggest that all, or a majority of, anti-religious advocacy is carried forward on the justification of concrete abuses (as universally agreed) on the part of religious people or organizations.
This is not at all my observation. Not all, not even a tenth of anti-religious argument is in this category. Perhaps a hundredth, and of this most is transparent gotcha arguments that are obviously not the interlocuter’s true rejection.

Come now, how much rejection of Communism do you think is because of how badly, historically, Communism has fucked up?

There are always going to be die-hard opposition members no matter how great your ideology is, for any sufficiently large population. It’s a natural variation. But to get bigger than that, your ideology has to have flaws.

I can tell you right now that if the Soviet Union were chill and sitting on $80,000 PPP per-capita income and this was an economic miracle wrought by Communism, I wouldn’t be bothering to oppose it. Lots of other people are like this, and yet you will find me bitching about Communism on this very blog.

The typical tactic here is to pick some modern leftist political position, enshrine it as a moral absolute, and then attack religion for not obeying it. Normal examples include opposition to abortion, gay marriage or divorce.

American religious groups blew an absolutely enormous amount of social capital fighting homosexuality, when homosexuality is only really a problem when combined with something like promiscuity - which, unsurprisingly, is not great for heterosexuals, either.

Now, unless I can cause a secular reasoning against it to catch on, there’s not as much social capital to fight polygamy.

But the real key thing here is that you want to apply literally infinite punishment to something like homosexuality. This is massively disproportionate to any sort of harm that it causes. It would be one thing if it were murder that was being punished in this way, but it isn’t.

You’ll forgive me if I don’t accept any of these as knock-down moral arguments against religion.

Not the point.

The point is the level of outrage over the actions by atheists, the whole “this is why everyone hates atheists” thing, the sympathizing-with-putting-in-camps, is disproportionate.

It’s entirely understandable that atheists would behave this way without being tools of the devil or even just cynically fighting for personal power.

Source: elementarynationalism politics perpendicular wood

mailadreapta

elementarynationalism

Militant atheists have won a lawsuit demanding a First World War memorial cross erected by the American Legion has to be torn down from public land because muh separation of church and state.

Yeah no, the new atheists are going in the camps first.

jeremyvyoral72

awhiffofcavendish

Self righteous superiority complex.

gouachevalier

“So, this week it’s Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson is coming down. I wonder is it George Washington next week and is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You know, you really do have to ask yourself where does it stop?“
–President Trump

Leftists sure do enjoy proving their opponents right, don’t they?

higher-order

And people wonder why Atheists are hated.

mitigatedchaos

You usually have to combine Atheism with something else to get this course of action, though. Like Leftism, or so on.

And they typically don’t agree with the religious on what morality is, so just sticking to the religious morality more strictly isn’t going to sort it.

Source: elementarynationalism politics perpendicular wood

thathopeyetlives

wirehead-wannabe

> Although the method’s success rate was about 3.5%, experts in the field are calling the study a “stunning achievement” that could potentially “eradicate infertility” if it can be applied in humans. The ability to make artificial eggs from any cell in the body could allow women who lack viable eggs or male-male couples to have genetic children of their own. “Reproductive age” may become obsolete.

Oh great, let’s just take the breaks off of the Quiverfull problem completely.

ozymandias271 ozymandias271

I am not sure why you think this is a big issue?

In the short run: the set “has ten kids” selects really hard for smart, highly religious, nonconformist people who take ideas seriously. With the exception of the second thing, I’m not sure why anyone in this community would object. It doesn’t seem like desire-to-be-Quiverfull is genetic: the religions in which people have ten kids don’t seem to have particularly high retention rates, particularly given that they’re willing to e.g. not educate their children to get them to stay.

If you’re like “eventually the world will be full of people who have evolved to want lots of kids because the others don’t reproduce, and then overpopulation”, yes, but an allele reaching fixation takes long enough that I’d be surprised if we were still meat by the time it happened, and if we’re not meat this is irrelevant. And I’m honestly uncertain which way the sign of this particular technology goes: sure, very enthusiastic people could use it to have a twentieth kid, but women who don’t want kids that strongly and thus didn’t have a kid until they were fifty could also use it.

jack-rustier

Worst case scenario: what will probably end up happening, if anything happens, is that you get a world where a million mutually exclusive cults try to outbreed each other. Which is to say, the world isn’t going to look very much different from this current version of it. The only difference is that everyone is able to have more kids without their own age becoming a factor.

Today’s meme magic phenomena will continue apace regardless of this technology being freely available or not.

wirehead-wannabe

I was focusing more on the genetic aspect of this + overpopulation in general rather than the memetic part, though I can see why people didn’t interpret it that way. Basically, I don’t want to live in a world crammed full of as many humans as possible. I want everyone to be able to have their own huge tract of land and live densely only when they prefer to.

sinesalvatorem

Solution here, it seems to me, is to buy your track of land while it’s plentiful and not let new people move in. Then you only have to fear eminent domain, but I think that getting the government to stop stealing people’s land is probably actually less of a hard problem than getting people to stop undoing infertility.

I find it just as likely that we’ll manage to convince everyone to accept forced-infertility-by-default after forty as that we’ll get everyone to accept forced-death-by-default after 80 once anti-aging is a thing. Besides, in both case, the worlds in which people actually manage to be banned from editing themselves are dystopian hellscapes anyway.

mitigatedchaos

That’s not a real solution. The political will under such conditions would shift, and democracy means you’ll be eminent domain’d for sure, even if it were realistic for most non-millionaires to attempt this in the first place.

Life extension would actually help here, however, since it keeps non-baby-obsessed people around and politically relevant longer. Make it a choice - live for a long time and have few children, or live the previous lifespan and make more babies.

sinesalvatorem

Make it a choice - live for a long time and have few children, or live the previous lifespan and make more babies.

Seen here: The single most horrify thing I have ever seen a transhumanist unironically recommend, out of a vast number of horrifying futury things.

thathopeyetlives

[Catholic screaming]

mitigatedchaos

If $Deity prohibits the use of birth control under Catholicism, then surely altering one’s genome to live past the normal maximum age of 120 years would be an even greater violation of the divine will?

I would expect the Catholic church to come out against human genetic augmentation, and thus life extension, even though I don’t expect them to come out against, for example, curing blindness.

Source: wirehead-wannabe politics religion

rtrixie

darkagenewsnetwork.wordpress.com

The future of religion and culture

I did a quick post elsewhere about my thoughts on the future of religion. It was suggested that I share it here and expand upon it. I’m not a theologian these are just some observat…

the-imperial-autocrat

A new article by @mulcahythebaronofurga.

“Christianity went through a process of modernization during the 20th century. As new norms replaced old ones. But churches are emptying because of the loss of authentic faith.

The left will come to realize that Islam is not going to tow the line of homosexual acceptance nor will it promote feminist values. They’re valiant defenders of Islam now. But they won’t be if they become 30-40% of the religious population in the United States of America.”

“The soft populist-nationalism of Donald Trump is bulldozing through the neo-liberal headquarters. Illegal immigration is down. He’s pushing for merit-based immigration. He’s questioning affirmative action. He’s laying the foundation for a larger movement that is currently in it’s adolescence.

Capitalism and mass immigration have destroyed traditional norms, faith, and proper birthrates. A rejection of modern capitalism would do plenty for societies around the world. In terms of reviving older cultural and political norms. I’m quite fond of distributism, capitalist protectionism, and a rightist variant of Kropotkinism as alternatives to the current system.”

@awhiffofcavendish @artist-tyrant @the-orthodox-autocrat @higher-order

@dietmountainmadewka @gospel-panacea @rtrixie @theorthodoxknight

rtrixie

Hmm, interesting

mitigatedchaos

I have various disagreements, but the real biting one is this:

It fails to account for Transhumanism.

For many years, opponents of Transhumanism have described it as techno-utopian fantasy that will never come to pass, and maybe the brain uploading part and the Singularity are, but they’ve been getting a lot quieter about the rest of it recently.

We have vat-grown organs in labs already.

We have nervous-system controlled robotic limbs.

We now have established, in a lab setting, some pretty serious genetic modification on human embryos, removing genes for a disease.

These aren’t science fiction. Only their economic viability is - for now.

Recently mouse lifespans were increased by 10-15% with stem cells in the brain, and studies on blood health with mice have also been promising (inspiring all those jokes about Vampire Peter Thiel).

There is a point where lifespan begins to increase more quickly and healthcare costs start to come back down again, where screening out genetic diseases and selecting for higher performance first hits the wealthy and then everyone else. This starts to undermine the effects of lowered fertility on more left-wing social configurations.

It undermines race, it undermines social darwinism, it undermines demand for religion.

You can ban it in Europe, you can ban it in America, but if you do, then the research will merely continue in Asia.

You might get a shift rightwards socially, but I don’t think it will look like what you expect. It will probably be in the form of a more holistic view of society where it is acknowledged that we can only afford to be kind if we’re careful not to increase the situations that required us to be kind in the first place. All the bitching about gays is a sideshow.

Source: the-imperial-autocrat politics mitigated future

andhishorse

argumate

“banning Muslim immigration will only increase terrorism!”

I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such an outburst.

it’s literally “the terrorism will continue until immigration improves”

mitigatedchaos

Consider what it says about Muslims. It isn’t good. It only reinforces the Conservative viewpoint, much like some of the reaction to Charlie Hebdo did.

andhishorse

I’m not convinced that it says something about Muslims that similar circumstances wouldn’t say about other groups. (Having conveniently used the term “similar circumstances” in such a way that I’m not sure that similar circumstances exist for any other group, rendering my claim suspiciously difficult to disprove). It seems to just say that this course of action will have the effect of non-negligibly increasing the very small proportion of Muslims who think that All Americans Deserve to Die, on account of this being a course of action that will likely (and not with maximal inaccuracy) paint us as Bad People who Must Be Destroyed.

mitigatedchaos

What I mean is what it says about left-wing opinion of them. “Oh those poor Muslims, they’re so easy to rouse to violence. They can’t help it, so be nice to them!” It’s a form of special treatment that would not have been given to other religions, and it isn’t a form of respect.

But of course, the Left already doesn’t want real cultural diversity on this matter. They don’t want, for example, the Jizya. They want a watered-down version of the religion that is compatible with Western Secularism.

Source: argumate politics religion

Look, I get that some people find religion more than just a little helpful, but extremely helpful, something that prevents their lives from falling apart.

And so I get concerned about the “we need to purge all religion everywhere” position, since I worry that it might accidentally break something that we won’t even realize is broken for some time, and then it will take a lot of time and effort to fix.

However, having experienced pretty directly that our control of ourselves is partially indirect, including ways in which personality is biologically-rooted, I cannot endorse infinite moral liability for finite moral flaw.

That’s also one of my oppositions to Anarcho-Capitalism. None of us truly have the agency to agree to an infinite deal, much less to be threatened into one.

politics perpendicular wood the invisible fist

sinesalvatorem

Something To Live For

sinesalvatorem

Human psychology continues to be basically what I’d predict - while still being startling at the same time. Specifically, getting people to settle down in families is a shockingly good way to make them stop being dangerously antisocial:

It was the most elite unit we [ie: The Palestinian Liberation Organisation] had. The members were suicidal – not in the sense of religious terrorists who surrender their lives to ascend to heaven but in the sense that we could send them anywhere to do anything and they were prepared to lay down their lives to do it. No question. No hesitation. They were absolutely dedicated and absolutely ruthless.

“My host, who was one of Abu Iyad’s most trusted deputies, was charged with devising a solution. For months both men thought of various ways to solve the Black September problem, discussing and debating what they could possibly do, short of killing all these young men, to stop them from committing further acts of terror.
Finally they hit upon an idea. Why not simply marry them off? In other words, why not find a way to give these men – the most dedicated, competent, and implacable fighters in the entire PLO - a reason to live rather than to die? Having failed to come up with any viable alternatives, the two men put their plan in motion.“

“So approximately a hundred of these beautiful young women were brought to Beirut. There, in a sort of PLO version of a college mixer, boy met girl, boy fell in love with girl, boy would, it was hoped, marry girl. There was an additional incentive, designed to facilitate not just amorous connections but long-lasting relationships. The hundred or so Black Septemberists were told that if they married these women, they would be paid $3,000; given an apartment in Beirut with a gas stove, a refrigerator, and a television; and employed by the PLO in some nonviolent capacity. Any of these couples that had a baby within a year would be rewarded with an additional $5,000.
Both Abu Iyad and the future general worried that their scheme would never work. But, as the general recounted, without exception the Black Septemberists fell in love, got married, settled down, and in most cases started a family…the general explained, not one of them would agree to travel abroad, for fear of being arrested and losing all that they had – that is, being deprived of their wives and children. And so, my host told me, that is how we shut down Black September and eliminated terrorism. It is the only successful case that I know of.”

I’m a crazy romantic and even I didn’t expect that tying guys like these down with wives and kids would have such a radical civilising effect. I wonder if this has any implications for gangs or other violent pests?

mitigatedchaos

If that’s the case though, then polygyny is a bad thing unless you want large numbers of risk-tolerant men.

politics religion

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

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