Does anybody get enough money for a private jet?

I get the thing about validation and reassurance. I'm not sure why astrology is still a thing.

Is this something we're supposed to "stan"?

I am with it.

The niche for somebody reading chicken livers is wide open.

In February Ms. Doyle posted a virtual sermon to her followers on Instagram, encouraging them to "embrace quitting as a spiritual practice."

Until I read the article, I though the sermon was urging them to quit Instagram.

Since televangelists on the whole are the sleaziest soul-sucking motherfuckers in the world, the new breed has a low bar to clear to be an "improvement." Also see 1.

I somewhat cringingly recall young sort of traditionally-religious* me (but an older age than makes me comfortable now) earnestly reporting to my mother that I did not think most televangelists were sincere**. She looked at me like a two-headed cow, laughed, and then considered her life choices that led to her raising such a naïve idiot son. But really, should not legit church people set on these mountebanks like a pack of wild dogs? They are utterly corrosive for any legitimate religious belief system. And yet.

*I went through all the motions but from an early age viewed it all as a big wad of stupid bullshit, but allowed that maybe I was not old enough to understand yet (and there were a number of areas where I did come to appreciate things that had previously not made sense to me).

**We lived not too far from a fairly well-known "church," the Cathedral of Tomorrow. It's minister lived in a big mansion with lavish cars quite close to us.

But really, should not legit church people set on these mountebanks like a pack of wild dogs?

We live in a celebrity culture. No one cares what some vagrant nobody with, like, 12 scruffy, unemployed layabout friends says.

One time on a commuter train I was seated nearby to a douchebag on headset, who was trying to sell a potential client on getting into influencer marketing. I got to hear the whole rundown of how their agency could put together a targeted portfolio of influencers to match the product's demographic needs. It's quite an industry they have going on.

Fishing is a job.

Marketing probably isn't.

"I will make you marketers to affluent, educated women 18-40."

Do not let your right hand cc your left hand.

I want moral authority from someone who isn't shilling a memoir or calling out her enemies on social media for clout

Leigh Stein is the author, most recently, of the novel "Self Care," a satire of the wellness industry and influencer culture.

I think the televangelist hook is not very illuminating. My wife recently read the Doyle on a friend's recommendation, and insofar as it had a salutary message, it sounded to me like permission (and a notional, virtual community) for women to not accept various roles as they were handed to them. Of course it's all wrapped up in incredible self-absorption, but there's a nugget in there that I don't think is really about religion.

Wikipedia tells me Glennon Doyle originally had the same last name as me, but as far as I know we aren't related.

ah, never mind, further googling says it was her married name.

Were you ever married to her?

No.

It was unlikely, but ruling out things clearly is important.

I want moral authority from someone who isn't shilling a memoir or calling out her enemies on social media for clout

YOUTH PASTOR KNOWS SOMEONE WHO ISN'T SHILLING A MEMOIR OR CALLING OUT HIS ENEMIES ON SOCIAL MEDIA FOR CLOUT.

19 made me look up the priest who taught freshman religion to me. Turns out he retired this past summer because he's really old now.

Which is weird because 1985 was only fifteen years ago.

13: One of many things that made me leery of recommending this article was the awkward collision of personal commentary and social critique. I don't have any idea who's in the intersection of Doyle et al's millions of followers, in the one circle, and these millennial "leftists" who worship Dolly Parton in the other, but I suspect it's a small number. However, I constantly underestimate the role of religious yearning in human life, so I'll grant her some allowances there.

Also, Flippanter!

One missing piece here, which I think I assimilated into my own worldview without remembering where I read it, can be found in this Tim Wu interview from 2016.

The story of the advertising industry is the story of the co-option of many of religion's best techniques -- primetime rituals, the idea of having people gather around every day or week at a particular time. This is a little like mass insofar as it's time devoted to a common subject every day.

In some ways, the idea of icons or religious iconography translated into the brand movement. The inventor of brand advertising was a devoted Catholic who was very interested in how humans would fixate on brands and come to imbue them with so much meaning.

These early copywriters were often ministers or former ministers who wanted to sell products to people the way they sold religion in church. The idea was that these products would deliver some form of salvation to whatever ails the consumer, and they were quite explicit about this.

Does he discuss this more in the book? Is it bullshit? Claims like this usually are!

Sayers was both very religious and big at advertising.

Her best known slogan was "Guiness is good for you!", which she came up with in the 1930s and i remember still being used when I was a kid. She came up with a campaign for Guiness that ran for about 40 years around images of toucans: "Guiness is good for you, so think what two can do."
I don't think anybody ever Whiffled, though, which is quite surprising..

Hamm's, because life isn't supposed to be fair.

I've seen the Guinness ads with toucans, but never the slogan that made it make sense -- I thought it was just colorful surrealism. Knowing there was a point to them is reassuring.

Budweiser, tastes better than it deserves to.

I have a beer snob friend who I enjoy scandalizing by saying, "Sometimes a Budweiser is just the right thing."

23. Early US advertising is pretty interesting. Wu's book looks like it has potential, but also Applegate's The Rise of Advertising in the United States which doesn't say much about religion but does go into some detail about PT Barnum and patent medicine. Maybe that predates the "meaningful" brands Wu writes about.

Beer snobs are way too into hops.

29: One of the greatest posts from the golden age of blogging is dsquared's In Praise of Budweiser. Come for the Slate pitch thesis, stay for the nested footnotes' deep dive into North Wales provincialism.

I've spent a lot of time in places where Budweiser is easily the best beer you can get.

32 Beat me to it.

I don't remember the last time I drank Budweiser, but my number one beer pet peeve is people who drink PBR (which is terrible) instead of something perfectly fine like Budweiser. I did like Coors (heavy) best among the big macrobrews (though of course the company's politics are problematic).

PBR is undrinkable. Coors isn't sold much around here.

I read like half that thread, and no one mentioned the horses.

37: it's in comment 12.

ha!

I agree these kinds of accounts represent something new to think about socially, but I disagree religion is a particularly close comparison. The subculture's relentless positivity and vagueness makes me think it's partially substituting for the role of friend groups - boosting each other up without, necessarily, much philosophical or mission content.

The article doesn't use the term "parasocial" once! Not that that explains everything, but it's a better guide and slot for theorizing.

"Parasocial" sounds like someone who dropped out just before getting the MSW.

A parasocialite is someone who dropped out before getting rich, but wants to cling.

Who called them peer support specialists and not parasocial workers?

A social worker.

Sometimes a Budweiser is just the right thing. Yes! When you're in the mood where what you really want is to crunch on a mouthful of ice cubes!

31: Exactly! The other way I needle him is by telling him he needs to branch out from IPAs.

36: Also correct!

The biggest local microbrew here at least as the decency to call their most popular beer "Big Hop" so you are warned. It's not bad as far as those things go, but it's an effort to drink more than one. They make a nice lager, but that was never in the bars much. Thanks to covid, they will now bring a case of it to my house. It's in 16 ounce cans and somehow three sixteen ounce cans make me feel more drunk than four 12 ounce cans.

Is it beer snobbery to say that all the American local brews I've tried have been over-hopped. Gusty bus and all, but a great beer IMO carefully balances malt and hops.

Sometimes they try to make them taste like a fruit, which is worse.

48: There are some good Belgian-style beers that are made in the US which are not hoppy.

Those are often too malty.

English and Germans, overall, do beer better.

Belgians got them both beat

48 I'm guessing you've never had a glass of Moose Drool.

Lots of Belgian beers are frankly bad in a way that even the cheapest British bitter can't manage. Some of the Belgian beers are great, but the overall average isn't great.

I really don't think there's anywhere that compares with Belgium in terms of both how good their best beers are and how many good options you can find at a typical restaurant or bar. I do think many parts of the US (California, Colorado, Michigan) are better than than Germany or the UK. It is true that US beer used to be better before things got too hoppy, but there's still tons of great stuff. The main problem with Germany is that you have such limited options: you're stuck with whatever the local beer is or hefeweizen. The selection of good German beers at a good US bottle shop is better than at almost any German bottle shop. If you're in a region with good beer and drinking stuff on tap, then yes it's great, but it's a real crapshoot. And of course it's utterly impossible to get say Belgian beer in Germany. The UK is great for above average beer at a good price and good ABV in a nice environment, but there's almost nothing that's memorably good.

If it's more than $15 a glass and tastes like medicine and fruit, you've either had Nyquil or a Belgian beer.

Honestly even if you just restrict to beers made in my town of under 100K people, I think they're competitive (and honestly probably better) than beers made in the whole UK.

Germany at least has Schneider Weisse Tap6 Mein Aventinus, which I'd put in the top 10 beers in the world. I literally can't think of a British beer which would make the top 100. That said, I don't think I've had anything from Buxton or Cloudwater, which the internet seems to think are the best.

The thing about the double IPAs and so on is that they're for consuming with overly salted, oily, spicy, excessively rich and unhealthy "American" food such as pizza and burritos and various spicy noodle dishes and the like. If your palate has been ruined by junk food, it's not hard to develop a taste for excessive hops. Personally, I'm okay with the west coast IPA because I don't actually like beer very much, but I don't mind the astringent hop taste.

Now I want chicken wings.

There are pepperoni rolls in the fridge, but that's too much grease for me.

I do like fruitier IPAs, so this whole "hazy IPA" thing has been a great development from my point of view.

If you're old and cranky, you can say, "I want something that tastes like a normal beer, but better. " It doesn't work, but it's more seemly than shouting, "Why the fuck does this beer taste like cherries?"

Mobes, just order the Kölsch.

There's a Lincoln brewery that made one of those. I think I liked it.

60 gets it right.
I like some IPAs a lot, including some pretty hoppy ones, but the hoppy ones kill your tastebuds and so they suck as a drink to have with food unless that food is very rich/oily/salty. And I like having beer with food.
Also, I sometimes like to have more than one beer, and most IPAs suck for that, because (1) since they kill your tastebuds you don't taste the 2nd one, and (2) I'm lightweight and many IPAs are 7+% ABV, so the 2nd one gets me way closer to drunk than I'd like.
Basically, the American IPA should be a niche preference ('a good beer to have it you're only having one and aren't eating anything') but is somehow the dominant craft/microbrew style. It's weird.

Beer is like circus peanuts. Unless it's stale, nobody is stopping after one.

should be a niche preference [...] but is somehow the dominant

Perhaps a runaway preference, like very long toed shoes, or hoopskirts, or cichlid tails (the last including glued-on plastic ones)?

57: I'm not talking about fruity sour beers, but, like, Ommegang's Hennepin from New York State is a tasty Saison.

Oh man, I love those sour beers. I don't see why true beer drinkers would like them, but I think they're delicious.

67. I don't understand why American beers are so insanely strong. British beers are generally 3.6 - 5.0 abv. and you expect to drink 4 British pints (80 fl. oz) and still carry on a coherent conversion and walk home in a straight line. You don't drink beer to get drunk. If you want to get drunk you drink shots, or wine at a party. You drink beer to get not quite sober and set the world to rights with your mates.

We use smaller glasses (12 or 16 ounces).

Yes, I know. You end the evening thirsty.

They will give you water if you ask.

If you order a whisky and it's not a Friday crush, they'll give you water even if you don't ask.

In conclusion, I missing going to bars, but won't be able to even after I get vaccinated because one member of the household is too young to be vaccinated.

You need to drink the better part of a gallon in a single sitting, or else end up thirsty? British people sure are built different.

Here's a question which I've tried to research but keep getting contradictory answers to: Does the effectiveness stat for vaccinations measure protection against infection, or against symptomatic illness? In other words, two weeks post second shot (assuming that eeeevvverrr happens), when I go to Miami Beach and lick all the used margarita glasses at the EDM club, will I have a 5% chance of testing positive, or a 5% chance of developing at least some symptoms of coronavirus?

Are you licking the inside or outside?

I have a risk calculator that asks which.

I think the effectiveness stats measures the number of infections detected in the treated group as compared to the control group. Some of those detected infections likely include people who were tested despite being asymptomatic, and probably some asymptomatic people in each group weren't detected. So there's not a straightforward answer.

Thank you -- that's unsatisfying but it makes sense.

72 is best criticism of American beer. There truly is a lack of good low alcohol beers. Even "normal" non-IPAs like Boont Amber or Bell's Amber are 5.8%

back before i became obsessed with swimming in the bay and discovered that no alcohol is a good idea if you want to maximize your time in cold water, i found that when i wanted to drink an ipa bluntly telling bartenders selling 86 gazillion hipster beers on tap i didn't want to be mugged by the hops in my beer usually resulted in something drinkable.

and i thoroughly endorse the too-much-alcohol criticism, yikes it is just heavy and unpleasant (like those CA wines that are only appropriate for consumption with a cigar, if you like to drink jam while puffing on your cigar puke puke pukeity puke imo!). fort point, a local joint, makes nice beers that are on the low end of alcohol for us beers, including some of their ipas.

But the strength of English beers has risen steadily this century. I remember the awe in which we held Fuller's ESB (or "suicide" as we knew it) because it was 5.5 whole % alcohol. Nowadays the off licence across the street hardly sells anything less than 5%.

Agree with 72. There are decent mass produced lagers in Spain where you can get a small glass for a euro and it makes it easy to have a social beer even at lunch without it being "I'm going out drinking." We saw a lot of locals who had a caña for their 10:30am coffee break.

71- this is what my wife (or are we going with spouse or partner as blog standard style now?) is into at the moment and it means she doesn't have to share because I won't drink that bacterial contaminated slime.

79, 82: It's also apparently the case that the different manufacturers designed their studies slightly differently in terms of what and how they were measuring, so the efficacy numbers aren't even directly comparable.

I realized I misframed the question in 79: it's not (I think) whether I would have a 5% chance of getting sick or of getting infected, but rather, whether I would have 95% lower chance of one or the other, than if I wasn't vaccinated. But either way, 82 and 89 give me the information I needed, which is that there doesn't seem to be a single clear answer. Thanks.

There's a Vox video that does a reasonable job of explaining it and mentions some of the differences in study design and what was being monitored.
The irony is that the vaccines, whatever the differences in mild and asymptomatic cases, seem to be nearly 100% effective at preventing hospitalizations and deaths, which means that the Covidiot talking point of "it's just like the flu" would actually be true if they'd get the damn shot.

91 is misleading. The studies don't have enough power (ie enough people for enough time) to say a lot about preventing serious illness. In one of the studies no one in the control group was hospitalized! So you could say that whatever placebo they gave was 100% effective at preventing serious illness.

91: How far are you driving to get yours? I am obsessively refreshing CVS and Walgreens and need to figure out when it would be rational to look again. Every now and again Walgreens lies and says shots are available but then says no, they're not when I enter all my info. The other day before Tim was eligible, I saw some in hard-hit neighborhoods. I would feel bad about taking those, and the parking is bad.

That said later data from Israel does show its good at preventing serious disease, but more like 90% effective (ie a tenth of the people hospitalized compared to without vaccination).

Bring me my meta-analysis hat.

45 minutes from home but I was going to go in to work that day and it's an hour from there.
92- I thought that was the interim analysis and the final included hospitalizations in all placebo groups. There was noise today about how there were only 5 serious events in the AZ placebo group but that was partly because it was 2:1 vaccine:placebo sizes.

These studies are designed to have enough power to tell if they're working to prevent illness. It'd be wasteful to give them enough power to say something meaningful about much rarer events like hospitalizations, because you'd need to make the study much larger and last much longer, and that would delay them coming to market. By design they can't say much meaningful about preventing serious illness.

65 to the entire beer subthread.

95: Bring me my broadsword and clear understanding.

27 hours to vaccine appointment and I'm paranoid that the test I sent in yesterday is going to report positive overnight tonight. I took it because I traveled out of state for the weekend so it was technically required on Sunday even though they lifted that requirement Monday. I had a negative test last Wednesday. I don't have any symptoms, just lingering sore legs from doing more physical activity than I have in a year. I'm trying to decide if it is positive for some reason if I'm just going to lie and get the shot anyway.

Twenty, twenty, twenty seven hours to go.
I want to be inoculated.

55
Lots of Belgian beers are frankly bad in a way that even the cheapest British bitter can't manage. Some of the Belgian beers are great, but the overall average isn't great.

I'm late to the thread, but can you unpack this? I've had a few Belgian beers I'd call average or mediocre, like Stella Artois, and several I'd call great, like Chimay or Brugse Zot, but none I'd call "frankly bad". Have I been lucky enough to miss the bad ones? Are our tastes wildly different?

Probably the latter. I like Stella Artois.

102: depends if you consider the weird baroque fruit flavours/9.8% knockout drops/stuff left out to go rotten gourmet delights, or récherché oddities. If you don't want muttonberries in your beer, or you want to use brewing techniques less than 2000 years out of date, the field thins out and you get a smaller group of really good beers (although they resemble each other quite a lot) and quite a few very generic boring lagers.

Is Chimay the one with the pink elephant? I like the pink elephant drink.