I would say the big problem is financial. Tesla is not profitable and needs money. The thing which keeps the lights on is the willingness of investors to keep supporting high valuations of stock and bonds.
579 karma · joined July 8, 2014
Fine, call it usurpation already.
Older pagan habits survived in later pagan habits. Pagan habits survived in catholicism. And catholic habits survived in Lutheranism.
And now this whole package, this sponge of history, is just being abandoned.
“You wrote "Of the 2 choices you present me with: as an artwork in a hipster lounge." We are making the assumption that the congregation can no longer support the physical building. What other option you would prefer?”
As an artwork in another church or in a museum or something like that? Where are you going with this?
“You wrote "If you use numbers in the same way as me ..." I understand the comment now is meant as sarcasm.”
No, this was actually not sarcasm. You pick numerous events from all over Christianity’s history. When I pick something, you complain it’s not “current”. Wtf? And now you complain that it’s “tit-for-tat” picking. 2 weights I call it.
“I do not get from your writings that your statements about history are made with a certainty which is not justified.” “your statements about history appear do not appear to come from a strong understanding of that history.”
One thing that oozes from all your writing is that you seem to think you’re lecturing me on stuff I don’t know or that I deny or something.
Aside from a potentially interesting tip on literacy in antiquity, you gave me nothing new.
“My question again is, so what? Cultures change.”
Ok, back on topic.
Yes, culture change.
I care because unlike you, I think the christian habits of our grandparents were interesting, positive and linked us to history. Loosing that is not good, even if you don’t believe in God.
“ (…) Christians stomping out older religions”
No, not stomping out. Usurping them, to use your latest choice of words.
“Yes, "hipster" is a derogatory term. Why else did you qualify it as "hipster lounge" instead of simply "lounge”?”
Sorry, I just wanted to be cool and hang out with you modern kids (<- sarcasm, to be clear)
Heads up: I probably won’t read your reply, as we’re going round and round and round.
Of the 2 choices you present me with: neither.
"This was part of a deliberate plan by the Catholic Church to co-opt local religions. It wasn't really "organic.""
Indeed, to co-opt it. It continued what came before.
"You may want to read..."
Actually bookmarked this.
"Would you rather have the sculpture of Apollo shown as artwork in a hipster lounge, that anyone can see, or destroyed to make way for a Catholic church?"
Of the 2 choices you present me with: as an artwork in a hipster lounge.
"The French revolution is hardly "current"."
If you use numbers in the same way as me, it's literally more current than the stuff you injected (lutheranism, Henry VIII, bishops smacking pagan shrines, Killing Time, Gusta Vasa, ...).
Many revolutionaries in France, like many more recent socialist regimes, aimed to root out christianity and religion in general, not change/extend/temper/reduce/garden wall/coopt/transform/echo/reorganize it.
"The modern France - a mostly secular country - has a lot of archeologists and archivists trying to identify and preserve history, including non-Christian history.""
France has museums and archeologists? Really?
Before you joined, it was about the decline of christianity in Europe, which is not bricks and books, but actual people identifying with and practicing a living cultural heritage.
We're going nowhere here.
"Wow. Really? "Hipster" is a derogatory term meaning...."
Lmfao here.
You lost me.
co-evolved. I understand that Christianity became big in Europe only centuries after Christ. And that it has changed and fluctuated a lot in its history. But I think there was never a discontinuity of the sort we see since ~2 generations.
"20 centuries" came into play when I deplored a modern fashion in which we're supposed to take the vastness of 2 millennia of highly complex history involving millions or billions of people, strip it from all context, compress it to a few soundbite sized low points and say: "this is Christianity".
-> About continuity and pre-Christian paganism: one of the things that fascinates me endlessly about the christian traditions of my community, is how many aspects of it are obviously echoes of pagan times. Many saints that used to be popular here, are not historical figures but thinly disguised pagan deities. A nearby community has (= used to have) a big tradition of Marian worship, which is almost certainly a continuation of an older cult devoted to a pagan fertility goddess. A nearby Christian chapel built next to a well, located beautifully in a forest in the middle of nowhere, was a place of worship in pagan times. Lots of Roman coins were found around the chapel. People used to walk there and tie strips of clothing from sick relatives to the chapel door. I can go on like this for quite a while. I would argue that the transition to christianity, despite its implicit intolerance at the time, does not seem abrupt but rather "organic".
Same for theology. (Btw, with some exceptions, this topic doesn't interest me much personally. Just like I don't care much for all the pseudoscience in secular academia.) But anyways, a lot of christian theology is obviously classical philosophy in a Christian jacket, with influences from Platonism to stoicism. In fact, christianity did something antiquity failed to do: in antiquity, becoming literate and trained in classical philosophy was very much a "1 percenter" thing. Early christianity brought a "pop version" of this literacy to a much broader public.
To conclude, I'd predict the exact opposite of what you said. To me, the current secular world actually seems more likely to destroy traces of what came before. Turning a church into a hipster lounge is so much more drastic than turning a pagan shrine into a church, or a church into a mosque. The French revolution or the various socialist regimes didn't seek to adapt, echo, continue, soften, change, transform, absorb or even abuse Christianity. They aimed to root it out.
The sudden and rapid abandoning of all things Christian suggests the secular revolution is finally succeeding in Europe. It's Brumaire of Year I. Or rather, Germinal of Year L.
Obviously, in all our secular glory and freed from the irrational, time consuming habits of our grandparents, Europe may never know wars or bigotry or superstition or pseudoscience or corruption again. And this time I will leave the sarcastic quip in :-)
I'm not talking about deist intellectuals and their opinions, or academic theology, or about places other than NW-Europe (New Mexico?), or a few big tourist tickets like Santiago.
I'm talking about the popular Christian day-to-day practice of regular people of NW-European communities, of which I can witness the last strange hours in my own community.
It's hard for me to come up with numbers beyond the kind of polls shown in the Guardian article or the drop in callings. It's not like we have centuries of headcount records for all the local events, cults and customs that used to exist here, the amount of tresses tied to chapel walls, or logs detailing the time and effort the local farmers, notables and grandmas spent decorating chapels. There have been no double blind control studies of how going to the village church made people's daily behavior slightly more mellow or made the community tighter here. By now there's mostly old pictures, living memories (less every year) and a rapid dwindling of what little remains today.
The edited stuff you refer to was a sarcastic quip along the lines of "Now that Christianity is gone, I'm sure celebrities or the state will tell us what to do." I removed it because, reading it back, I thought it detracted both in style and content from my main point.
Namely my prediction that future people in my community will regret current people having turned their back on this heritage so recklessly. They may try to reconstruct some of it, but it will be hard without continuity. I can see that happen even if Christian belief itself never bounces back. (Which would actually put such efforts at risk, by making them prone to political recuperation.)
Thanks for making my point.
Unlike what you say, abandoning this patrimonium has only started recently. Definitely not centuries ago. For instance, where I live, there is still an annual Christian pilgrimage. Attendance started dropping only a few years ago. I'm not sure if it will still exist in a few years. A lot of us are fascinated and sometimes even a little envious when learning about foreign cultures. Yet when our own culture is dying or has died, we shrug. Some even want to beat on the corpse.
Also: "we have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God" sounds to me like a pretty accurate description of mankind, including Christianity itself. Other ways of saying the same thing are: "don't be too satisfied with yourself" or "try to do better next week". I'd say the first version packs more punch but that's a matter of taste.
(Then again, as I implied earlier in this thread: maybe this matter of taste is an important part of modern Christianity's problem.)
20 centuries of Christianity has been reduced to a caricature. Most people don't even understand what has been given up. It's all persecution, corrupt popes, hatred for science, opium for the masses, child molestation and the flying spaghetti monster.
Like you mention: being active in a church community in the country where I live, will induce flippant jokes at best and real hostility at worst.
I'm also tempted to look at the clergy. They seem to have lost a certain kind of "fighting spirit" and focus on avoiding controversy. Modern masses are spineless and devoid of flavor or a sense of history. It sometimes feels like they hired f*cking Nickelback or the marketing board of the Disney Corporation to advise them on liturgical reform. (Except Nickelback and Disney sell and they don't...)
The cultural loss of all this is imho enormous. It's not just stuff like being part of an active community that includes the broadest possible cross section of the population (across class, age, wealth, profession, personal interests, ...). Or the weekly ritual of this community, the gentle but firm reminder that we're all mortal and that we should at least try to live the good life.
It's also more mundane stuff like the feasts, the fasts, the saints, the pilgrimages (basically an entire village hiking to a nearby basilica), the processions, the choirs, the maintenance of beautifully decorated popular chapels in the middle of fields, all the local cults and customs, some of which probably even predated Christianity, etc. These things gave local places a lot of flavor and it's all gone in a few short years...
Once again, I don't even think you need to believe in God to appreciate all of this wealth. Some day, its loss will be greatly lamented.
It's like deciding to cut some organ out of your body just because you don't understand its clinical function (so it must have no function) and because it was involved in some disease a few years ago (so it must be something fundamentally bad).
I marvel at the arrogance, the sheer recklessness of this negligence. Unlike the neglect of beautiful piece of nature, or the neglect of healthy eating habits, I can't see right now how this disaster will be reverted.
However, to be a top future artist: say and do stuff which is super controversial to your art friends. Have an actual vision, be fanatic about it and avoid everyone except those who are truly interested in what you do. You'll probably die penniless even when you're supremely gifted.
Things like gold, bitcoin, stamp collections, art, expensive cars etc serve a similar function: the function of "saving", as opposed to "investing".
With "saving" I mean storing some excess purchasing power in something that doesn't have a counterparty and doesn't generate income, but also can't be duplicated easily so is likely to at least not loose a lot of value.
Of course, all these saving devices have different properties.
Gold and bitcoin are liquid, whereas art is extremely illiquid. Gold and bitcoins are egalitarian, in the sense that a poor man buying gold gets the same thing as a rich man buying gold. Art is elitist and susceptible to huge winner-takes-all effects. All are susceptible to stealing, but cryptocurrencies are susceptible to total failure because of their complexity (bugs, mathematical weakness, ...)
This article is yet another example of how not just the financial economy but also the world of "real stuff" has become calibrated on policies of extremely low interest rates. The financialization of everything is complete.
And here's the important bit of the article:
"Sharply higher interest rates or a sudden spike in futures prices could leave traders with losses or stretch their financing needs as hedging costs go up."
The priests have spent a decade praying and sacrificing central bank balance sheets to the gods of inflation. Some day their prayers will be heard but we may not like it when that happens.
USD -> USDT and back is traceable using standard investigations of books and banking transcripts of entities dealing with Tether's managers.
Also, Tether is by now an internet-wide phenomenon. It's in the spotlight. And yet it keeps growing.
Why USD -> USDT -> BTC -> USD?
Why not USD -> BTC -> BTC -> BTC -> USD?
What does the extra layer of USDT really add legally, except for some added obfuscation that a few extra "intra-bitcoin" transactions would add as well?
(Genuine question, this is one of the more fascinating stories I've heard in a while :-)
I wonder if it would be possible just through statistical or network analysis of all tether transactions on omni layer, without knowing the full narrative of Tether, to get some idea of the game.
So did Thomas Friedman change his name?
Also, to all people in economics, or rather social sciences: stop with the dinky physics comparisons.
With buying puts or similar construction that involves optionality, if you can buy them at a nice price, you're not as dependent on the intermediate path taken by the price.
As a sidenote: that's why I liked platinum and rhodium as speculative investments in 2017 and I like them again for 2018. Platinum especially has been declared dead, exactly because of this "future is imminent" sentiment and nobody will supposedly need catalytic converters anymore. Platinum has been comatose for years on end now, despite production shortages and the supply side risk coming from South Africa's politics. Most platinum mines are operating at a loss.
But a lot of what also passes for quality journalism involves not news agencies but newspapers and magazines. I consider a lot of these to be just more sneaky versions of Breitbart. They are more subtle, use more sophisticated language, have specific formatting and typesetting, have a longer history and they mix up their activism with a broad spectrum of neutral news. (I'm mostly familiar with the press in my own country so it's hard to give widely recognizable examples.)
And of course, then there's publications like The Economist. In my very personal opinion, even though they may be "honest" in their intentions, they still end up giving their readers an illusion of understanding. You don't really know what happens in Iraq or Syria or China from reading the Economist. But it's so well written that you might end up believing you do.
Anyhow, I see enough reasons not to trust anyone who wants to use this fake news scare to punish their competition or to herd the population to the "proper" sources of information.
The untamed internet, when used properly as a source of information, will just give a snapshot of bewilderingly diverse points of view. Which is still not much, but so much better than the best polished story written by the best journalists.