MolochAlter

Depends, lots of churches welcome lay members of the community to the ancillary activities they organise. Catholic churches in my experience are much more embedded in their communities in southern europe regardless of the status of the people participating.

My father has been lapsed for 40+ years, never shows up for church and doesn’t participate in any of the religious aspects but he still runs free arts and crafts workshops in the parish buildings, for the local kids whether they’re part of the congregation or not.

It’s the fact that church comes with an actual presupposition that it isn’t optional, while de facto being optional.

Going to church (in contexts where denomination shopping isn’t a thing at least) means going to a place where a person is not there to validate your particular perspective but instead often to tell you and everyone else in the group to do better, publicly, not because they’re better but because they appeal to higher principles whose correctness is taken for granted buly the congregation.

See also: the absolute brain lottery winners on the internet bitching that the pope isn’t a real catholic for telling them they’re bad catholics (arguably bad christians in general, definitely bad people) for dehumanising poor people and immigrants legal and illegal.

I’m far from a catholic (that is, I’m actually a lapsed catholic if you ask the church, but I was never a believer, just born into it) but there just isn’t a space where you’re going to participate, respect the ethics and morals, still fall short of them, be chastised, and be forgiven, that doesn’t involve some religious aspect.

Growth and constant growth are not the same.

Obviously growing a business is positive in some circumstances, the point is that growth for growth’s sake becomes the name of the game once you go public, whereas when privately held the company can decide whether it makes sense to grow in that moment or focus on other goals in the short term to benefit a long term strategy.

Then they collectively forgot about that last part.

It’s not “companies”, it’spublicly traded companies.

And the answer is quite simple really: the moment you become publicly traded your stock becomes your product, and everything else becomes a means to deliver better stock prices to your investors.

Not all companies are publicly traded, I patronise privately held companies wherever possible because as a client I’m still at the core of their business strategy, and I’m wary of the alternative.

At the end of the day, bad strategies result in bad products and services. Vote with your wallet, it’s very possible.

Not really, believing there should be affordable housing for everyone doesn’t mean all housing should be affordable to anyone.

I believe there should be different levels of density of housing and pricing in different areas, and that the state should subsidise some percent of rent based on income, possibly up to 100% up to a certain cost, if you haven’t had evictions on record; but I also own different properties I rent at market rate because it’s commensurate to the cost of living in the area, and a lower rent would not make living there any more affordable, and would open me up to possible tenant disputes if someone who can’t afford to live there were to move in.

If the cost of living went down in the area I would also adjust accordingly, as I don’t believe in fleecing people and it’s also generally beneficial to be in line with market value to maximise client volume.

Affordability isn’t a “rent is too high” issue only. It’s a “there is no place I can afford to live in that makes sense for the places I need to reach” issue too.

Cost of living is a huge factor, I have friends who work in the service industry who almost had to move completely out of the city due to the 22-23 price hike, despite local laws preventing rent from following inflation.

It’s only hypocritical if you believe no housing should be market controlled, which is a non-serious opinion, to be frank.

A bunch of Skadis custom hooks and holders. Most involved ones were a paper towel roll holder and a magnetic file rack for some Stanley metal files.

Well yeah, “shut the up” is not a correct phrase… ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡° )

Jesus that is not a small bug lol

Wtf why?

Getting in shape won’t make you think you’re less ugly, you’ll just find different things to obsess over until you find something you can’t change.

Dysmorphia is a mental illness issue.

You can be ugly, or out of shape, or any of those things, but the idea that you are so uniquely, supremely ugly that you can’t make up for it in other ways is literally just internet idiots being idiots and not touching enough grass.

I’ve seen men with very obvious deformities happily married with kids, I’ve seen perfectly toned bodybuilders being (correctly) snubbed for being insecure dickheads, I’ve seen perfectly average dudes dating models, looks matter but not the way you think they do.

Get out of your head, get treatment if you truly have these feelings of immeasurable ugliness because they are a legit sign of treatable mental illness, and for the love of christ go out and make some normie friends, you clearly need them.

Normies are happy not because they “don’t get it” but because they are typically pretty well adjusted and average, while your online friends are just like you: a bunch of toaster fuckers who met in the toaster fucker forums reinforcing eachother’s obsession with dicking down toasters.

To be fair, are there many conversations where that comes up at all unless someone in the conversation is an ace/aro person?

This makes me wonder why I’ve never heard this perspective before?

Well, I am not a progressive, for one. I agree with some principles but I disagree fundamentally on what a world that fulfills those principles looks like, so I can sympathise with the members of the movement but I find them misguided at best and actively hostile to my other principles at worst.

In fact, I know I proposed some ideas antithetical to some (IMO wrong) dogmas of the progressive movement, such as doing away with the politeness nuclar standoff, the tone policing, etc, not only because they’re actively hobbling the movement and making it politically irrelevant, though they are, but because they are things I find fundamentally detrimental to society at large if they were to ever become more mainstream than they already were until the recent fall out of favour of progressivism in the american zeitgeist. (And when america gets a cold the rest of the world starts sneezing)

I wonder if people say this in mostly conservative forums, and I just don’t see it from my personal fish bowl?

Perhaps, I wouldn’t know. I’m just a European liberal who has to sit on the sidelines and quietly hate american politics for polluting the rest of the world with its fumes, tilting the scales in favour of the far right as a backswing to a “far left” political climate that literally never materialised in our own countries just because your progressive movement’s optics are bad enough to be fucking radioactive.

It’s almost as if it would have been useful for this position to be expressed earlier to educate people before all the frustration occurred.

We tried to tell you and were called every single name under the sun.

Hell, I got told in this very thread that I want to create spaces hostile to women, by some coward who then deleted all their posts in response to me asking for a clarification as to why.

American liberals, do yourselves a favour and cut out the progressive activist tumor from your political sphere, let the far left deal with them, and just actually stick to your principles, if you still have any that aren’t entirely based on reflexively doing the opposite of what the right says. (Yes I am bitter, how could you tell?)

I’m sorry that’s just rad as hell, masculinity has nothing to do with it, that’s just great taste.

that most cheaters are never given a second chance

Source on that, also even then, the ones who are prove the statistic to be quite reliable. See here for the effects on both the cheater and the victim.

Considering the effects on the victim (suspicion even on non-cheating partners for years) you actually don’t deserve a second chance, even if you were on the straight and narrow for the rest of your life.

It’d be like you intentionally smashed his kneecap then stayed with him out of guilt to help him walk.

right but the norm is already changing on so many other issues why is this an exception ?

Cause this change is actively immoral and harmful and people don’t want it, duh.

Things change because people want them to change. They don’t want this to change because they don’t want to enable potential cheaters in their lives, because as something becomes less socially stigmatised the less of a barrier there is to actually doing it.

when he posted we were back together on his social media he had tons of people come out of the woodwork to tell him not to take me bac and I was a worthless woman that deserved no rights

See here’s the thing: a person who is able to rationalise something morally unjustifiable once, will be able to do it again.

By cheating you showed everyone you have no real spine to speak of, you can rationalise it all you like (that’s part of the problem) but the reality is that when you had the choice to break up and pursue the other person or not and cheat, you managed to talk yourself into accepting betraying the supposedly most important person in your life.

Moreover, there is absolutely no way for you to ever prove you won’t do it again until you die, and even then some people will still be skeptical even if you never do it again, and they’d be correct to be.

You may have grown a sense of respect for other people’s trusts, or you may have gotten better at cheating, or your boyfriend may have settled for a serial cheater and decided to turn the other way.

Either way they are trying to spare him from this AND to prevent society at large from accepting cheaters back into relationships because nobody, not even cheaters like you, wants cheating to be done to them, and making it something you can come back from makes it more likely.

ETA: given your post history, this one especially, you probably are getting shat on simply because you, specifically, deserve it, not because people hate cheaters in general (though we do).

Your first post on this topic is literally a thinly veiled “Why would my mid-ass boyfriend not take me back? He’s mid and I am letting him fuck me, why would he think he deserves better?”

The answer was in the post history all along: people are telling him to drop you because you are lower than pond scum and they see through you. I pity him for being indeed mid and spineless enough to have accepted you back.

What part of TERF ideology is actually feminist

The part that is your standard boilerplate second wave feminism, the only difference is how they define “woman,” which simply hasn’t changed in the last 20 odd years to conform to the mainline progressive position.

They are effectively conservative feminists, which sounds counterintuitive until you realise feminism is old enough to easily fall within the range of things that can have a conservative/progressive split.

not a thinly veiled mask for conservative-based gender essentialist ideology

You mean like feminism was until the adoption of intersectional sociological lenses by the progressive part of the movement? (and it arguably still is essentialist, just on qualities other than birth sex)

Cause like, Andrea Dworkin, Valerie Solanas, Julie Bindel, they were feminists before a lot of the feminists of today were alive, and they don’t strike me as trans allies.

I’m genuinely curious because all the advocacy I’ve seen from TERFS is all about demonizing transgender women, infantilizing transgender men and… Siding suspiciously often with conservatives more than their supposed ideological ancestors.

You’re not wrong, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t feminists, it just means they have different ontological positions that lead them to side with different people.

Often the enemy you know, especially one that appears (but isn’t, in the case of conservatives) on the backfoot can look positively attractive compared to the new and alien.

If anything it should tell you how essentialist and misandrist second wave feminism was that they’d draw the line at male women and female men, and not at cis conservatives.

In brief, my point is: just because it’s not your wave of feminism that you identify with, doesn’t mean your wave doesn’t directly descend from it and that it didn’t pave the way for yours.

Movements change and evolve, society as a whole was not trans inclusive at all until the late 00s, and even then it was touch and go, and it’s incredibly naïve to think that feminism, of all things, would somehow be morally lucky from its inception in the 1800s and never in ~150 years sided with the mainstream on axes other than pushing for women* to be equal to men* (*provided they are the right demographic on every other axis).

Are you under the impression that the term “TERF” was invented in 2008 because that’s when trans exclusion became a thing?

Do you seriously think that a movement that over its lifespan at some point didn’t even include non-white women started off including non-female ones?

“Trans x are x” as a widespread progressive sociological stance is new, I don’t even know if it’s 20 years old, it may be closer to 10, even.

there is a point at whoch your movement is compromised so much that winning doesn’t matter because the common goals of the movement are no longer desirable.

That’s why movements should be built around goals and not allegiance/morality.

“This is the movement to achieve X.”

“X has been achieved.”

“Aight, job well done, time to move on.”

This is what the right does (or tries to, anyway), and they’re eating the left alive, maybe it’s worth taking this very non-partisan strategy from their playbook?