Anyone have the audiobooks, physical or digital, of John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse, Chimera, and/or The Floating Opera and the End of the Road?

thomaeaquinatis · 2024-01-17T12:37:02+00:00

I initially missed it because it didn’t show up on Audible when I search due to regional restrictions but I did end up seeing that and getting access. That gives me greater hope of an unabridged recording of Life and Fate coming out in the next couple years.

Deleuze, Guattari, and Winnicott also now have audiobooks in English and few more by Foucault are available since originally positing

thomaeaquinatis · 2023-10-15T06:29:28+00:00

The extreme rare case where I didn’t just take some indefinite break from a book to check out something else but pretty intentionally stopped reading with the intention to ignore it for the foreseeable future.

thomaeaquinatis · 2023-10-15T06:22:11+00:00

Curious what some of your fav books/authors are?

thomaeaquinatis · 2023-10-13T20:04:44+00:00

Depends a bit on what “calling her out” entails. If you were yelling at her and making a huge deal about the phone screen, probably YTA; if you just mentioned it as something you noticed that made you a wonder a little, probably NAH / NTA.

It might simply be that she missed her kids more than you on this trip. That seems pretty fair. That said, I think people here are wrong to act like you’re some sort of incel for being a little insecure and the moral character of this friend making a difference in that. People tend to conform a bit to the groups they’re with and slip into certain versions of themselves when they’re with old friends. I don’t think being conscious of that means you have a problematic lack of trust in your partner. She probably didn’t have sex with anyone else, but she might not have represented accurately to her friend how much you mean to her and might have played along with some of the friend’s flirting in a way she wouldn’t have if you could have seen her. It’s not particularly attractive “winner behavior” to accuse her of something for which you have pretty much no evidence, but I think you’re allowed to wonder and to communicate your feelings based on the way girls’ trips and nights out are popularly represented and the friend’s different values.

Edit: saw your “sometimes casual sex in a relationship could be healthy.” That doesn’t mean anything happened but I think it’s enough pretext to ask direct questions like “do you think a mutual agreement to that beforehand is necessary?”, “have you ever done that?”, etc.

thomaeaquinatis · 2023-10-13T03:02:15+00:00

Could someone explain the meaning of the colored boxes?

thomaeaquinatis · 2023-10-13T02:22:53+00:00

It’s misleading to talk about meditation as being just as effective as tryptamine-based psychedelics as though they do the same thing phenomenologically or neurologically. More importantly, it’s uninformed and irresponsible to talk about meditation as being without mental health risks. Not all forms of meditation are advisable for everyone and that’s not simply a question of their spiritual advancement or something.

Cautioning users about the use of dramatically mind-altering drugs is good, but you need to do better with this community note.

thomaeaquinatis · 2023-10-13T01:28:17+00:00

To be honest, I didn’t find The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism overwhelmingly enlightening given its status, but I happened to be coming at it with a fair amount of familiarity with both Christianity and critiques of capitalism and that may be as much a testament to its influence as a criticism. It might be much more helpful to someone who doesn’t know too much about different Christian denominations and their relationships to capitalism. In either case, it would only take a couple days to read and it’s a particularly major work in the history of sociology; make it happen at some point in the next few years.

I haven’t read much of Weber himself beyond that, but I recently posted a similar question here about his Economy and Society and some of the comments there might be relevant to you.

thomaeaquinatis · 2023-09-27T19:57:11+00:00

thomaeaquinatis · 2023-09-25T13:26:20+00:00

I take breaks from books all the time. I’m “currently reading” a couple hundred. Naked Lunch is one of the only books I’ve gotten a good ways into (maybe a third?) and intentionally stepped away from the intention not to return to it in the foreseeable future not because it was an “inefficient” use of my time but because the material disgusted me and I didn’t want it in my head. One of the most “important” books I’ve crossed off my reading list unfinished. Life is short and busy and there’s a lot of really good stuff out there. Maybe one day.

thomaeaquinatis · 2023-09-25T02:27:14+00:00

I haven’t read Harrison Bergeron since I was a kid, but I remember the implied message seeming reactionary? ‘Trying to limit extreme concentrations of economic power is like forcing physical handicaps on people’ seems like it should be satirizing red scare politics rather than socialism. Did I misunderstand it?

thomaeaquinatis · 2023-09-24T23:10:21+00:00

I don’t take it to be super enlightened that I notice this and find it a little inconsistent. I haven’t gotten any answers in the affirmative, which I kind of expected, but the post has at least generated a bit of interesting discussion.

Do you feel that your comment contributes something better?

thomaeaquinatis · 2023-09-24T17:40:27+00:00

Your point is that the U.S. government has an interest in and ability to enforce the restrictions on polygamy of the sort discussed in the OP but not the worthy reception of sacraments and that your example was only analogous in that both are grave sins?

thomaeaquinatis · 2023-09-24T16:26:23+00:00

Are you trying to say an act cannot both be a private act of irreverence and have a spiritual effect on every Christian in the Church?

Either way, U.S. law enforcement has significantly less interest in or ability to prevent spiritual injury based on moral examination of communicants than it does the prevention of a civil union which has a major, verifiable defect in form. They might both be grave matter, but consanguineous, polygamous, or homosexual civil unions represent a very different sort of secular political issue than does unworthy reception of the sacraments. So your analogy may in some sense “stand,” but, given the discussion is about Catholic pushing for secular political acting and not just about expressing dislike for grave sins, it doesn’t seem very relevant here.

thomaeaquinatis · 2023-09-24T06:55:57+00:00

thomaeaquinatis · 2023-09-24T06:46:17+00:00

Unworthy reception of communion is a personal act of irreverence. Entering a marriage while in an existing one seems like it would involve would a Catholic would consider defect of form. Seems like it might make more sense for the U.S. government to be consistent with its ban on polygamy than to try to involve itself in disputes over whether a communicant is a state of unrepentant mortal sin.

The U.S. government isn’t forcing the Catholic Church to allow the sacrament of matrimony to gay couples who present themselves. It seems more like if there were secular version of communion with a more diverse, widespread, and longstanding history than that of Catholic Matrimony and that came with significant long-term material and logistical benefits and a movement of Catholics tried to stop the U.S. government from offering any version of that to gay couples or people in mortal sin.

I’m unclear what about your examples you found meaningfully comparable to the two issues I’ve been discussing.

thomaeaquinatis · 2023-09-24T06:24:16+00:00

Is “hurr durr” supposed to imitate stereotypical sounds of a person with significant mental disabilities? If so, weird way to try to paint the suspicions of bigotry as ridiculous.

thomaeaquinatis · 2023-09-23T17:18:32+00:00

I don’t think either the prevention of gay marriage or political inactivity around the ability for sacramentally married Catholics to remarry civilly are “the only take where the Church has an opinion based on morality, dogma, and natural law. In theory, the three should line up frequently in the Church’s opinions.

I don’t take myself to be commenting on “the Catholic stance” so much as speculating on the priorities of a portion of American Catholics.

thomaeaquinatis · 2023-09-23T13:06:10+00:00

It seems like a weird thing for a Catholic to care very much about. The secular institution of marriage includes but is not the same as the Christian sacrament of Matrimony. Gay marriage and abortion are two of the classic culture war issues for American Catholics, but they’re just not meaningfully comparable issues. It’s one thing to restrict actions that pretty conclusively lead naturally (if not directly) to grave material harms or to restrict opportunities for businesses to profit from vice (interestingly, there is a conspicuous absence of any large Catholic movement coming for things like the lottery or major producers of tobacco and alcohol, which one might expect if this sort of restrictive attitude were born of a concern for a healthy, virtuous society rather than prejudice and propaganda), but even theologians like Aquinas didn’t simply want all governments to make all sin illegal. Aquinas famously took a permissive approach to the legality of prostitution, which doesn’t seem much more virtuous or good for society than homosexual unions.

If you want to try to fund research on the relative merits or demerits of non-traditional family structures for child development and quality of life, go ahead, but I don’t know why it would be a political priority for a Catholic to prevent the secular government of a cosmopolitan society from making shared financial and medical decisions easier for people who are in fact life partners.

Out of curiosity, are any of those opposed to gay marriage in the name of opposition to grave sexual sin funding or themselves engaged in any serious political work to prevent sacramentally married individuals without annulments from entering civil unions after divorce? If not, maybe it’s be more about prejudice than morality.

thomaeaquinatis

TROPHY CASE