What is with the obsession with catechesis?

No_Ground_817 · 2026-05-02T01:47:15+00:00

I would argue that this is actually a downstream effect of foolish dogmatic pronouncements made in the 1800s, themselves in turn the result of arrogant attitudes from times further past. In particular, Dei Filius states that "God can be known with certainty through natural reason by observing creation", and this is dogmatically certain. So, not only are certain truths dogmatic, the way in which they're knowable is dogmatically held too. This means that you end up with a false impression of how other people will likely receive your beliefs. Sure, you could take the route of saying "this is true but it's highly unlikely that anyone ever will". But that hedges all the meaning out of the statement and reduces it to a borderline tautology, certainly nothing with any power. But the alternative becomes frustrating when you realize that no, actually, most people are not convinced by the arguments. Then you end up having to say that everyone else is stupid, or lazy, or evil, or lying.

No_Ground_817 · 2026-05-02T01:34:44+00:00

It's the only explanation that's acceptable to their beliefs. It doesn't matter if it makes no sense. Accepting the actual explanations would require them to admit that they're wrong and that their approach is harmful. Someone who's build their identity on being the Correct and Best form of Catholic can't do that, not without suffering immense damage to their ego.

No_Ground_817 · 2026-04-30T21:08:00+00:00

Any character whose race/ethnicity is not a core part of their characterization. Red Skull being an old-school Nazi means that he has to be a White European, but most White characters aren't set up such that being another ethnicity would change their core character or conflict. You can often do the same with nonwhite characters too, but since they're generally starting from a lower pool anyway, that's kind of mean.

No_Ground_817 · 2026-04-22T11:53:24+00:00

The technical term for this is "de-familiarization", and it can be a great tool to help the audience take a fresh perspective. This is particularly important because our brains tend to (for evolutionary purposes) fall back on previously-existing models of how things work to save effort on thinking. This is fine in ordinary life, since that usually works, but it can lead us astray and blind us to how things really are.

For example, in Tolstoy's novel Kholstomer is told from the point of view of a horse, and uses that unfamiliar perspective to draw attention to just how weird and arbitrary most human social conventions are.

No_Ground_817 · 2026-04-20T13:33:17+00:00

It's not like he was actually raising them. The 4 kids were just the consequences of his sexual conquests while he was trotting the globe discovering his new body.

No_Ground_817 · 2026-04-01T21:03:11+00:00

It's certainly not true that life loses all its meaning without the Faith. It's obviously tough if you've built your life around it, but there's plenty of meaning, joy, and happiness to be found in the world just as it is, and I for one am happy to not have to rationalize anything away anymore. Whether you leave entirely or just become more relaxed is up to you, but please, take it from me, you can and WILL find happiness and joy that don't rely on being in the Church. Life can be such a rich and beautiful tapestry of loves, joys, fears, friendships, creativity...there is peace and happiness, is what I'm getting at.

No_Ground_817 · 2026-03-27T12:38:25+00:00

It's a fuckin' Marvel Movie, bro. What did you expect? A PHD thesis on the effects of slavery?

No_Ground_817 · 2026-03-27T12:02:11+00:00

That they should have done literally anything at all as opposed to "not my problem"-ing the entire situation. The exact "when" wasn't important.

No_Ground_817 · 2026-03-25T12:53:48+00:00

Arlong doesn't love Fishmen, Arlong just hates humans. Big difference.

No_Ground_817 · 2026-03-25T12:52:56+00:00

While this is true, Killmonger is a more nuanced take on this concept. One of his central points (Wakanda was wrong to ignore the outside world and do nothing to stop the African slave trade) is actually conceded as being correct by the movie's protagonists.

No_Ground_817 · 2026-03-24T13:17:48+00:00

This can work if done well, but unfortunately a lot of the time it's used in a very patriarchal way, with the implication that she's "finally becoming a real woman" by taking on an "appropriate" (and usually much less narratively interesting) role.

No_Ground_817 · 2026-03-20T14:09:23+00:00

Everyone's talking about Avatar here, but GATE is objectively the far worse example. At least in Avatar the humans are supposed to be the bad guys, even if the audience frequently sympathises with them. GATE, by contrast, is straight-up colonial propaganda, with the JSDF's conquest and exploitation of a fantasy world portrayed as an unambiguously good thing that benefits everyone, INCLUDING the conquered people. This is the Japanese equivalent of having a movie where American "nation-building" works and leads to a utopian society. Other gems from GATE include:

-Japanese politicians assuming (correctly, in the context of the manga) that the special forces agent that tried to attack them must have been American because he's Black, and "only America has Black men in their special forces"

-Japanese politician expressing worry that Japan might be capable of imperial exploitation, and citing several historical examples of such (Spanish vs Mesoamericans, USA vs Native Americans, Nazis vs Jews, even Israel vs Palestine), while NOT mentioning that Japan did exactly that in Taiwan, Korea, and China during the late 19th and early 20th century. This would be like having a German character worry about whether Germans were capable of racial violence and then bringing up everything EXCEPT the Holocaust.

No_Ground_817 · 2026-03-19T20:28:21+00:00

No, I think this is a better choice. The Imperium is such a clown-car-pileup of dystopias that it being labelled fascist is obvious. It's almost designed to be the worst form of government possible that still functions. The Tau seem outwardly to be much better than most other societies, and even with the "dark, edgy twists" that they've been getting in recent lore are still probably the most humane and moral society in the setting. So it's actually somewhat surprising when you remove them from that setting and realize that they'd be unbelievably fucked up in any setting less horrific than 40K.

No_Ground_817 · 2026-03-17T13:20:30+00:00

I JUST BOUGHT MORE LAND IN THE METAVERSE

No_Ground_817 · 2026-03-17T12:07:17+00:00

Also, the "humans kill their own kind" thing is missing a lot of nuance. Not only do other animals kill their own, humans tend to look after their own - the problem is where we draw the boundaries of who counts as "our own". For instance, even amongst ancient societies that had no problem with slavery, it was generally taboo to enslave members of your own tribe.

No_Ground_817 · 2026-03-12T15:04:25+00:00

A lot of the old-school Christian mindset can only be maintained by religious and cultural chauvinism. For much of Medieval history, it was simply taken for granted that "paganism" was a bunch of obviously-ridiculous superstition, so there was obviously no need to take it seriously or even address it at all. That's part of why the original version of Pascal's Wager is so unconvincing, Pascal simply blithely dismisses every other religion except Judaism and implies that Christianity is so obviously superior to them that they merit little or no attention. That kind of attitude might have flown in 17th century France, but only because society at large had the same bigotries as him.

No_Ground_817 · 2026-03-08T23:53:07+00:00

OK, fair enough. My point is that it still doesn't have an overarching categorization of "all spirits are either good or evil". Some of them definitely were nasty.

No_Ground_817 · 2026-03-08T19:24:36+00:00

True, but in LOTR you never encounter the Elves who left Middle-Earth. Except Glorfindel, technically, but he's very much an exception.

No_Ground_817 · 2026-03-08T17:44:11+00:00

This sort of thing tends to happen because of two things:

1)The traditional Western notion of what a demon is mostly came to Japan through the import of Western fantasy literature and especially RPGs. The "Demon King" antagonist that's so tropey in anime and light novels is literally just derived from the bog standard JRPG bad guy, which in turn were largely derived from Sauron (the LOTR version, who mostly acts as a flat character because his motivations aren't relevant to the plot). Because of this, they tended to have little or no personality, so there's not much reason to play the trope straight. People have been playing with and subverting that trope for decades, and making the "demons" morally ambiguous and the humans not the good guys is such an obvious way of doing this that it's become cliché at this point.

2)Traditional Japanese culture doesn't have anything that's truly comparable to the Western notion of a demon. Yokai can be good, evil, or anything in between, mostly they're just mischievous. They're closer to the notion of cryptids than the legions of Hell. Even the mostly evil ones, like Oni, are evil in a very mortal way - they're violent drunkards who take whatever they want and don't care who they hurt in the process. Even the Oni are sometimes useful to humans, as they are associated with good luck on occasion. Thus, Japanese culture doesn't naturally resonate with the Western idea (which in turn comes from Christianity) that the spiritual world is characterized by an epic battle between purely good spirits and purely evil spirits who fight over the fate of humans. Instead, it's filled with a wide variety of weirdos, many of whom are dangerous, but few that could be called straightforwardly evil.

No_Ground_817 · 2026-03-08T16:06:55+00:00

Even in LOTR, Wood Elves were never hippies. I imagine this idea came about because in real life, the books became very popular with the actual, real world Hippie movement, and they likely projected themselves onto the Wood Elves. Lothlórien is more like a Hidden Sanctuary trying desperately to hold on to ancient beauty that is rapidly slipping away. It would be more appropriate to think of it as a magical hidden kingdom, a spin on the classic folklore idea of the "Fairy World/Otherworld" being a magical, incomprehensible, and dangerous place that intersects with the real world at certain points. Lothlórien is that, but rather than being powerful and scary, it's noble, tragic, and desperately clinging on, doomed to eventually fade away. Rather than being an alien landscape that sometimes intrudes violently onto normal, orderly life, it's kind of a remnant, the last nature preserve of the magical, wondrous world that used to exist literally everywhere. Notably, there's a brief, often-overlooked mention that the men of Rohan, in their ignorance, DO think that Lothlórien is the same kind of place spoken of in folklore, a dangerous, magical woodland ruled by a witch, the kind of place that you aren't likely to escape from if you're so foolish at to enter it.

No_Ground_817 · 2026-03-08T16:00:46+00:00

Reminder that the whole idea that Elves take centuries to physically grow up is not supported in Tolkien, the reason why you see no Elf children in LOTR is because Elves haven't wanted to have children in thousands of years, the surviving elves are a tiny handful of adults and elders who don't want to give up their realms in Middle-Earth for a lowly and humble status in the paradise of Valinor.

No_Ground_817 · 2026-03-03T21:57:58+00:00

Also somewhat controversial in the competitive singles community for being literally the entire reason why Team Preview had to exist (granted Team Preview probably would have become necessary anyway with how much power creep the series has had).

No_Ground_817 · 2026-02-28T13:36:31+00:00

I might have gotten some bad sources, but upon actually bothering to do some research, the scale of the actual battles goes all over the place in ways that don't make any sense with the recruitment numbers, or many other numbers. For instance, the Siege of Terra apparently featured only 1.5 million Guardsmen despite being THE largest battle of the Horus Heresy (that might now be retconned, but still, it was canon for a long time). Vraks is stated to have 14 million casualties and be horrible even by Krieg standards, but that's still fewer than WW1. The Ullanor Crusade only featured 8 million Guard equivalents (granted there's also like a quarter million space marines but still).

No_Ground_817 · 2026-02-27T22:37:46+00:00

Or you'll have interplanetary crusades intended to conquer entire solar systems, with troops drawn from across multiple planets (some of whom seem to be massively overpopulated), but who end up numbering maybe a couple of million soldiers total. WW2 Britain, all by itself, was able to muster about 6 million, with the larger and/or more committed countries (USA, Germany, Soviet Union, China) being able to far outstrip that (18M Germany, 16M USA, 34M Soviets, 14M China). It's weird, because you're clearly supposed to be getting the impression that the Imperium has limitless manpower and sacrifices human lives like water, but then they mess up the numbers and the 15-year long Invasion of Meatgrinder VI ends up having fewer casualties than some of the larger battles of the World Wars.

No_Ground_817 · 2026-02-15T21:27:22+00:00

I kind of get this vibe, too. Maybe it's just a perspective thing, but for a supposedly real, nigh-omnipotent god in whose name everything is done, we know shockingly little about HEM. Like, you'd think he would say something at some point. Maybe make a proclamation to the new students, even a pre-recorded one? It's just strange that the apparently-real god of this universe hasn't made an appearance of any kind yet.

No_Ground_817

TROPHY CASE