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Historical Karen

J

Jarhyn

Wizard
Joined
Mar 29, 2010
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17,031
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Androgyne; they/them
Basic Beliefs
Natural Philosophy, Game Theoretic Ethicist
Hear me out here...

We have in our society today, much talk of this person named Karen.

There are myriad stories about her terrible acts and behavior.

Everyone hates her.

You could walk up to any person in the US and ask "what do you think of Karen?"

Of course, Karen is not just one person, and there is no actual historical Karen. Karen is literally millions of people all over the world.

Perhaps some are named Karen. Perhaps the earliest was named Karen.

But when people talk about Karen they are only talking of her in vanishing minority, as a grain of sand on a beach of equivalent grains of sand.

Karen is in fact an amalgam.
 
And that's why I think Karenism is bunk. Why should I conform to their cult of polite public behavior, if the story of Karen and her exploits has no exact historical basis? I can special-order whatever I want at the Arby's and berate the manager to their manager if I like, because Karen never existed. There's no way my hyperfixation on modernist quasi-empiricism could possibly be causing me to miss the main point of Karenism, which is more about the behavior than the person as such.
 
Given the common usage of the name Karen it shows that there was an historical Karen. In fact I saw Karen speak at Alki Beach in Seattle, what became known as Karen's Sermon On The Beach.

There was one pint of Hagandaz ice cream, but she scooped out enough for a 1000 people. A miracle.

When she was done she walked across the water to downtown Seattle.
 
steve_bank said:
Given the common usage of the name Karen it shows that there was an historical Karen. In fact I saw Karen speak at Alki Beach in Seattle, what became known as Karen's Sermon On The Beach.

There was one pint of Hagandaz ice cream, but she scooped out enough for a 1000 people. A miracle.

When she was done she walked across the water to downtown Seattle.
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Nice use of allegory to make a point.
 
Politesse said:
And that's why I think Karenism is bunk. Why should I conform to their cult of polite public behavior, if the story of Karen and her exploits has no exact historical basis? I can special-order whatever I want at the Arby's and berate the manager to their manager if I like, because Karen never existed. There's no way my hyperfixation on modernist quasi-empiricism could possibly be causing me to miss the main point of Karenism, which is more about the behavior than the person as such.
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Indeed, it is important to look at the reality of Karen. It has never had definite reification, but it doesn't need to have had definite reification.

The stories are just as useful, as a starting point to investigating a philosophy of ethics, as fictitiously attributed to the Cuphead Flower Meme as fictitiously attributed to "Karen": this is a fiction, but it is, as a fiction, also a pool for reflecting upon. It is in fact valuable to recognize that it is in it's own way a fiction which sees  plentiful rather than  singular reification.

When people get in their heads that a story needs to be reified to be useful for reflection, they can indeed fall into that hole.

This is why it is useful and advised to disabuse this notion early and often: that myths of education need no personal absolute reification to be educational or something necessary to heed.

Rather, take heed the good idea buried in the fiction: the empathy for those whom impolity in the story would hurt if they existed is a basis to not make them ever exist with such impolity in the first place.
 
I'm as atheist as the rest of you, but that doesn't mean I need to pop lorazepam every time Jesus is mentioned!

I think it would be fun to talk about the Karen meme, but this thread is posted in the "General Religion" subforum. Carrier has been shown to be intellectually bankrupt; so now the non-existence of the Canonical Karen is being used to infer the non-existence of Jesus! LOL.

We all agree that Christians often seem quite stupid when they defend their faith. But I wonder if some atheists realize how feeble-brained some of their comments sound.

"George" is a meme in Las Vegas. (Raise your hand if you knew that. Is that meme well-known?) Unlike Karen, George is likable. "He spilled his drink on the table but then he turned into George: he gave me a green chip."

I don't know where "George" came from. But I guess it means George Washington never existed! 8-)
 
Swammerdami said:
I'm as atheist as the rest of you, but that doesn't mean I need to pop lorazepam every time Jesus is mentioned!

I think it would be fun to talk about the Karen meme, but this thread is posted in the "General Religion" subforum. Carrier has been shown to be intellectually bankrupt; so now the non-existence of the Canonical Karen is being used to infer the non-existence of Jesus! LOL.

We all agree that Christians often seem quite stupid when they defend their faith. But I wonder if some atheists realize how feeble-brained some of their comments sound.

"George" is a meme in Las Vegas. (Raise your hand if you knew that. Is that meme well-known?) Unlike Karen, George is likable. "He spilled his drink on the table but then he turned into George: he gave me a green chip."

I don't know where "George" came from. But I guess it means George Washington never existed! :cool:
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Swammerdami, you will forever be talking past the argument in a condescending way if you can't at least acknowledge first and foremost that there is strong evidence that all of this is just an amalgam of different stories, some more than others, and many clearly entirely made up, often of clearly different people.

My thought was to point to a phenomena which well illustrates the concept of cultural amalgamation as an extant phenomena, so as to even "invent" a representative fictional character to face upon some more widespread behavior.

In many respects, "in death, his name was Robert Paulson."
 
Jarhyn said:
Swammerdami, you will forever be talking past the argument in a condescending way if you can't at least acknowledge first and foremost that there is strong evidence that all of this is just an amalgam of different stories, some more than others, and many clearly entirely made up, often of clearly different people.
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You're right. I apologize. I do get frustrated by some of the implications here. If I've never written fiction myself; that means I don't understand that Hemingway's writing is fiction. :confused2: I quote C.S. Lewis; that's dismissed as I knew it would be. Carrier employs Bayes ridiculously but nobody complains about THAT, except for me.

Anyway, even if Jesus WAS an amalgam — what IS your "strong evidence" for that, BTW? — then I win and the mythicists' claim is WRONG as long as one of those Jesuses was a Galilean executed by Pontius Pilate.

Are you going to address my questions just posted in the Jesus thread? What is the evidence that "it is likely that Jesus was used as a name specifically for folks who got executed bucking against the orthodoxy"?

It IS reasonable to compare the writings of Hemingway and Reynolds and learn how to guess which is likely fact and which fiction. I wish the anti-historicists would do this when they compare, say, Josephus, the Toledot Yeshu, and even the non-supernatural parts of Mark.
 
Today Trump has become a catchall term for many things.

Jesus as a general tag is just as plausible as the rest of the ideas. Maybe I'll write a book to supplement my retirement.

At this pint to me the gospels appear to be a confltion of oral stories that undoubtedly changed as they were told and retold.

Jesus wading into the water became Jesus walked on the water.

The original gospel writer put it all into a narrative.
 
steve_bank said:
The original gospel writer put it all into a narrative.
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We've discovered that there were hundreds of these "gospels." We can't be sure that any of the four "canonical" gospels came first. Mark may have been 27th and all we have left of the hundreds of others are a few bits and pieces of a much larger corpus.
 
So, what is the Good News of Karen?

Don't you Karen-believers see how stupid you sound! How can you believe this person exists who is reported as being in 100 different places at the same time?

If you believe she exists you have to identify when and where she is (or was), what she did that was noteworthy, and what source is reporting it.

Even if your expectation is to win converts to her in 100 or 1000 years from now, you still have to give them these basic facts about her.

I have heard the same rumors about her, but nothing that seems noteworthy or worth recording and telling to anyone, even if it's all true.

(Although I have to admit that the first time I heard about her I got aroused fantasizing about her, even hoping she'd see me and suspect me of something and chase after me and wrestle me to the ground. Maybe I needed to get some shoe polish and paint myself dark in order to attract her. But in general there was nothing special about her, nothing to tell to anyone else.)

The ones from history who are remembered and recorded for the future are the ones who reportedly did something unusual and of consequence, or having an impact on people (hopefully beneficial impact).
 
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And yet again, the point flies far over @Lumpenproletariat 's head, their reflexes not quite up to the task of catching it.
 
Lumpenproletariat said:
So, what is the Good News of Karen?

Don't you Karen-believers see how stupid you sound! How can you believe this person exists who is reported as being in 100 different places at the same time?

If you believe she exists you have to identify when and where she is (or was), what she did that was noteworthy, and what source is reporting it.
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No more so than G.I Joe, Jane Doe, Spartacus or any other personal names that are stand-ins for some general characteristic. You should not need to be an Einstein to comprehend that.

 
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