Terry Pratchett famously said that sin is treating people like things. You can debate that however you want. I mean, I was properly brought up and learned the ten commandments — whether you’re religious or not, they’re the ur-foundational-stone of western civilization.
Sure killing someone is treating him/her as a thing, his life not his but ours to end. And the same for stealing from him: things can’t own anything. I’m going to say that bearing false witness is also treating your neighbor as a thing, and beyond that that worshiping him or her is just as bad, as it steals his or her humanity and replaces it with a tonkenized image. I’m going to say the same for coveting his ass, (or any other part of him) or his wife and husband.
But that’s weak tea, in a way. You can say it’s treating him/her as things, and that’s not wrong. It’s perhaps more accurate to say that if you get yourself into the state of mind where you think it’s fine to do all of those things to others, you’ve put yourself beyond humanity — or below humanity, if you prefer — into a state in which you are the only real being in the universe, moving through a landscape where everyone else are just… tokens in a game, yours to move around or ignore. (\
Oh. I get it! Sorry, I just had a click-it moment. Much has been said about the original sin, including thinking it’s about sex, or — in the dopey seventies — about nuclear war. But it is in point of fact this sin, because this is both the sin of Satan — knocking G-d from the heavens and filling the world with only you and no one else is real — and the original sin of humans: we’re all born like that. If what I understand of neurology is true, we’re all in the beginning of our lives, the only consciousness in our universe, and we think everything is under our control, like our hands and feet (which to be fair aren’t under our control at all. And also our universe at the time is just a little further than our body.)
Okay. I’m not going to turn into a baptist preacher — theological snap-click, come out of this woman! — and you non-believers need not be alarmed. That was just a sudden realization and neat from a philosophical point of view because it clicks with human physiology and development.
The point is that we are born like that, and empathy — understanding others are also human and have their own will power and their own agency — comes later, developing slowly and — frankly — by fits and starts. In many people it cuts off at a very rudimentary level, and it can, I think, be knocked down to almost nothing if a human is in survival mode. Yes, we hear much about total strangers dying to save children and that of course happens, but we also know about the herd of humans that tramples others when panicked. (I was once almost caught in one of those. Thank you mom, for grabbing me and flattening me to the wall while the herd passed by.) I can tell you no one in that crowd is thinking of the others as being as important as themselves, or as having their own rights and their own lives.
Which brings us to the point of this post: the type of human who never really learns to consider others as true people seems to have an advantage, at least in modern society (say since we stopped living in small tribes (maybe even then)) because they don’t feel any compunction in doing horrible things to others or horribly manipulating others to obtain power. And they need power, see, because they’re alone in a universe that is all them. So they must control all of it, and for that they need power.
This is the original sin of governments: it tends to be populated by people for whom every other human is chattel: a piece on the board to be moved by the sole real human in the universe.
The only curbing of this is for society to hold onto and zealously protect every human’s rights, and every human’s dignity. Not because they are useful, or because they can do things, or — even — because they enjoy themselves. Those are all nice things, but if you start putting that condition — any condition — on “these humans are worthy of life” you end up finding reasons to remove those impediments “they only think they enjoy life. How can they when–” And the type of people who get power over others are very good at those game, because, you know, no one else is real.
Giving the government ownership over who lives and dies — MAID and euthanasia, and “these children will be made comfortable and left to die, comfortably” — for any reason, whether for “their own good” or for the good of society always ends in piles of dead, because those in power have no respect for human — or any other — life.
Making yourself dependent on government, with UBI or any of the abominations the socialists love to propose is just as bad.
The government giveth, the government taketh away, and to the government you are just chattel. Something that has a use and that is looked after as long as it fulfills its use and doesn’t cost too much to maintain. And after that? It’s disposed of. Because it’s just a thing. To be used, or not, looked after, or not, by those that have actual agency.
Can anyone explain to me why, in point of fact, that isn’t — in all but name — chattel slavery?
According To Hoyt 
Amen Sister Sarah!
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That is the unique defining characteristic of the United States Constitution — it established a government that is the property of the people. Every other society in the world, throughout all of history and right up to today, has made the people property of the government. That’s what the Leftroids want to bring here. That’s what all their yammering about the government’s ‘rights’ is about.
THE GOVERNMENT HAS NO RIGHTS!!!
People have rights. The government has limited authority delegated to it by the people, which can be rescinded if it is abused. We have to get on with the job of rescinding all that abused authority, starting with taxes. Abolish income tax! Disband the IRS! Set 140 million people free from Tax Hell!
You have also explained the evil of institutionalized medicine. Patients are not customers; they are assets, to be managed, traded, depreciated, and eventually disposed of.
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Folks need to read Amendments Nine and Ten, word for word.
They were meant to be -Capstones-, not afterthoughts.
“This much -and no more-” was the intention of the whole document. Naturally that gets in the way of “Power! ….. Un-limited … POWER!!”
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Same with individual rights.
Specifically ADA. It is not the “right” of a wheelchair, or service dog, to be in a specific location. It is the right of the handler of the service dog, or user of the wheelchair, to have the medical aid with them, the person.
Guns. It isn’t the right of the gun to be there. It is the right of the gun carrier, the person, to carry (as long the person is legally allowed to carry).
An aside. Currently, WP is giving me comments even before I read the main posting. Nice, because I do not have remember to “click the box”. How long that continues to work? No clue, given this is WP. While I doubt I’ll never have something to add, it could happen (if it does, I’ll make sure to say “hi”, so people know I haven’t disappeared). Means I do not need to use “c4c” to get comments.
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Yup. All humans are equally created by God, and therefore each human holds equally sovereign rights and power. The government derives whatever power it possesses from the just consent of the governed.
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As the mullahs may be about to find out.
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The MadMullahs are -way- past FA into FO.
And this time they do not have King Mierdes to help them.
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Over the years, I have thought about the role of “duty” as a companion to rights. Not all rights imply duties, nor do all duties imply a right, but they often go hand in hand. While we can ensure rights are protected, we cannot force people to fulfill a duty — and great harm comes from claiming a duty as a “right”.
For example, the First Amendment is the right to peaceably assemble and speak your mind — we have a duty to organize ourselves, religiously or otherwise, and express our thoughts. The Second Amendment protects the right to keep and bear arms, because we have a duty to protect our loved ones and our country. The right to a lawyer and a jury don’t have associated duties — these rights are necessarily recognized, though, to keep a feral government from trampling on our liberties.
An example of a duty that’s pushed as a right is education — we have a duty to search out the truth, and to sort through the claims put before us to get that truth, but we don’t have a right to an education. Indeed, we cannot have such a right, because no one can force anyone to learn! And many of our education woes are a direct result of trying to do so. (And what’s worse, we assume — and try to force — that everyone learns the same rate and can learn the same things at the same time, and thus wreak havoc on people who deviate from the “normal”, and who would be just fine if left to learn what they want to learn, when they are ready for it.)
But you can see this in other things, too, such as a “right to prosperity” (everyone needs to buy a house!) or a “right to medical care” (and government must provide it!), among other things — every time we try to treat a duty as a right, it leads to all sorts of market distortions and woe!
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So much this!
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My dad said – I am sure he read the quote somewhere – children are barbarians which need to be civilized every generation. I took that to heart parenting my own children, and what a difference it has made when I compare them with their peers. It also relieved a lot of my frustrations when parenting, because it reminded me front and center that children *don’t know* and must be taught to care.
Governments are not children, but periodically they must be reminded that they also must care, else civilization slides back to barbarism. Or to put it in good old Judeo-Christian terms: children must be taught right from wrong because they have original sin, institutions built by sinful man reflect his frailties. This is especially true of anything and anyone exercising authority because the only One virtuous enough to exercise true authority is G*d alone.
I have been editing my detective novels and one of my alpha readers thought I spent too long (probably ha ha) on the philosophy of duty and the obligation of a virtuous man. I think duty, obligation and service and who or what has the right to compel them is worth exploring thematically, because too often society frames honest duty as slavery and hides the chains of slavery under the frame virtuous obligation.
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“Each generation is invaded by barbarians. They are known as ‘children’.”
I’ve seen it around, it made me giggle.
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Barbarians, hell, they start as outright savages. Takes a couple years of civilizing to get them up to mere barbarians. 😛
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“Each new generation is a fresh invasion of savages.” –William Hervey Allen, Jr. (Author of, among many others, Anthony Adverse)
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You are on target. I have my own way of putting it–treating people as means and not ends. It’s the reason the “NPC” meme makes me uneasy; as seemingly spot-on as it is regarding the behavior of certain groups, it also invites us to think of them as…less than human.
History is very clear where that leads.
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It’s hard not to when they act less than human. ☹️
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The “NPC” meme reminds me of the idea of the “alien enemy”.
Not in the sense of “they came from other space” but in the sense of they aren’t human.
Using the American Indian tribes as an example, most (if not all) ancient tribal groups saw themselves the “only true humans”. In fact, looking at the actual names of American Indian tribes, we see the meaning as being “The People”. Thus, the other tribes were “Not People”.
It’s part of our Human Nature, the people we know and associate with are People while those other people aren’t “Real Humans”.
Most of us don’t really believe that they aren’t “Real Humans”, but emotionally….
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There’s maybe a sliding scale of human, and a lot of motte and bailey style cheating on basic questions within the discussion.
So there are degrees of culturally alien.
There are seriously foreign people overseas who still come from western civilization, or who live in a reasonably modern lawful civilized society that does not have deep deep western roots.
Then we have some tribal scale migrations from seriously barbarian societies.
Anyway, voting is a civil right, for citizens, not a human right for humans.
Entitlements under law are pretty strictly downstream of peace consensus, and not things we are completely free to renegotiate with the other parties to become more theoretically consistent. WE can posit changes, but we as small groups have limited ability to coerce everyone else to buy into our preconceptions, that would be tyrannical.
There are some really fun definition of human arguments to be made, that could potentially exclude leftists. What things are mere cultural differences, and what things are actually verifiably non-human?
A basic fact is that I am not very well equipped to apply certain necessary elements of this train with any real understanding or authority.
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I have to call you out on “Voting is a civil right.”. It is not. It may be a duty, however if you check the Constitution, it specifies how to select voters. It does not ever say that voting is a right.
Otherwise spot on.
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Um, actually, it’s right there in the 10th Amendment ‘catch all’ provision.
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Yes and no. It isn’t mentioned specifically, which puts it in the “reserved to the states” category.
However, the Elections Clause still applies:
This comes up fairly frequently in the context of voter id. The Reconstruction Amendments didn’t change that. The states could still set rules on who could vote, but they had to apply the same for everyone, and they couldn’t exclude former slaves.
Unfortunately, Democrats have always been about selective and unequal enforcement of laws.
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I stand (well, sit) corrected. It is the 9th which states that just because a right is not specifically called out in the Constitution does not mean that it doesn’t exist.
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Orsen Scott Card stole words from somewhere (Scandinavian, I found out) to describe this in the Ender’s Game sequels. Of course, I don’t remember what they are. They are words for degrees of “foreign-ness”.
IIRC, they are “my tribe”, “other tribe”, and “demon”. There might be a fourth. Let’s see if the Intertubes can quickly tell me. For certain definitions of “quickly”…
Utlanning – same species, different region, city, or country.
Framlings – same species, different planet.
Raman – sapient beings with whom meaningful communication is possible.
Varelse – recognized as sapient, but with whom meaningful communication is not possible.
Djur – non-sapient beings. Interestingly, I think this could apply to dogs and cats, not just aliens.
So, technically, the Left are Utlanning. They feel more Varelse.
Interesting Fantasy question: Are elves Utlanning, Framlings, or Raman? What does “species” mean, here? If half-elf/half-human children are possible, that leans me toward Framling – even if they live on the same planet. If not, Raman.
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I prefer the term “Willing Slave” for some, but I think it -much- more vile than “NPC”.
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Apparently in some circles it’s taboo to use the word, “slave.” You should say, “enslaved person.”
The “church history,” book my poor beloved got me uses that term and I saw it in reference to the latest translation of the Odyssey.
(My beloved is “poor,” because I’m still reading the thing and sharing the more idiotic bits. Especially the bit about how “queer theory,” is a valuable lens through which to view the early “clubs of the Anointed One.”)
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Yeah. It’s nonsense.
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Ok, that’s just freaking dumb. Odysseus would say “slave” the same way he’d say “soldier”, “king” or “dockworker”
It was the person’s station in life, no doubts that it was still a person.
And queer theory for looking at the early church? Oy vey…
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The people who use “enslaved person” support slavery. That is, they think that it is right and just that one person should be forced to labor against his will for the good of another.
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I’m a big fan of small government. But human nature being what it is, there’s always scope creep.
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“Much has been said about the original sin, including thinking it’s about sex”
I have shocked many a fellow Christian when I point out that “Be fruitful and multiply” is found in Genesis 1:28 but the fall doesn’t occur until 3:6. So obviously Adam and Eve were having sex in the Garden of Eden. OT I know.
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Well, they were supposed to. There’s nothing in Genesis that says they actually did – and nothing that says they didn’t. St. Augustine thought they didn’t, but I don’t think his opinion is de fide.
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It’s an important theological question. Was consummated marriage ever fulfilled in Eden, under the correct design conditions? Or for some reason was it put off?
But we’re not told, and no kiddies resulted at that time. So it’s also not really our business, and there’s no way to prove what opinion is correct.
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Hm… does it actually say the first children were only born after The Fall?
Handy theological loophole, there.
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Wasn’t Seth the first kid born after Eden? Or do I misremember?
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He was the first after Cain and Able.
For a story, one could do the cheesy “it doesn’t say that was the first time he had relations with his wife” or the slightly more defensible “this is the first relations after they fell, which is relevant to Cain and all later children being born sinful.”
For reality, she says for the audience since she knows Crossover already knows this, you’d have to do massive deep dive into what the most likely original phrasing was, and if it had implications about, say, this being the act which creates the married state.
https://biblehub.com/bsb/genesis/4.htm#1
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I thought the first two were Cain and Abel?
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Exactly. Cain and Abel were born before Seth.
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But both Cain and Abel were born after Adam and Eve were kicked out of the garden. You’re correctly remembering Seth’s birth as being after an important milestone, but that milestone was Abel’s murder.
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No, Cain was. They were kicked out of the garden in chapter 3, and Cain was born in chapter 4. Seth was the first boy born after Abel was murdered.
Note, any girls they had were not listed, and when Cain was born Eve said “I have gotten a man with the help of the Lord” (ESV translation), which doesn’t preclude the idea that her firstborn was a girl whom the Bible doesn’t mention. Most people think Cain was the first child of Adam and Eve, and it’s entirely possible that he was. But it would also be consistent with the text for him to be their first son, but not their first child.
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And then of course there’s the interesting question regarding Cain’s wife and descendants. The Bible says he went to the land of Nod and got a wife.
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St. Augustine observed that he, of course, married a sister of his and pointed to the Greek gods as evidence of a time when this was acceptable.
After all, incest prohibitions force you to enter into new relationships with other people in order to marry, which is all for the good of society, but when you were, in fact, already related to everyone else they served no purpose.
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Somewhere I’ve seen or heard or hallucinated the idea that the Lord “wrote” an “ideal” genome for Adam, then cloned that (sans Y-chromosome) for Eve, making them identical twins of opposite sex. Not necessarily homozygous (izzat the right word?)in every allele–i.e. not like lab rats–but with no deleterious recessives for their “incest” to double up.
AFAIK the Lord didn’t introduce the incest prohibitions until He gave them to Moses in Leviticus 18, sometime around 1500BC. By that time enough harmful mutations coulda built up that those siblings’ kids would get double doses of Bad News.
Of course there’s the other Interesting Question about Cain’s descendants, that the crazy Right (counterpart to the equal-and-opposite crazy Left) uses to justify their anti-Jooism–never mind that Christ explicitly said to let the tares grow and let God sort ’em out when He harvests.
“Every fool in error can find a passage of Scripture to back him up.” –uh, Ben Franklin? Mark Twain?
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Heinlein. :D
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I think the “fools in error” line predates Heinlein, but now that you mention him, Lazarus Long bought a pair of opposite-sex-indenticals to free them from some “HORSETHIEF” slaver. Maybe that’s where I got the Adam&Eve thing?
IDK what happened ‘way back then. I believe that the Creation story in Genesis is true, though simplified such that neolithic goatherds could get everything goatherds needed from it. (When little kids ask where babies come from, you tell them the truth, but no more of the truth than little kids need.)
I DON’T believe that God is gonna turn out to be just a techno-advanced space alien who’s domesticating us, but that’s shakily based on the idea that such an alien would be just another creation of the REAL God.
I do expect that something–real space aliens? AI? Nehemiah Scudder?–SOMETHING is gonna show up, maybe soon, that attempts to sell us the idea that he, or she, or it, or “they is” the messiah returned, and at least a third of us will buy it, and will try to force the rest of us stubborn fools into line. You know, For Our Own Good.
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He bought a pair of twins who were in fact, not at all related to each other.
The identical opposite-sex twins were cloned from him without his consent.
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Who has NO idea just how lucky he was… Lazarus Long has THOUGHTS about slavers.
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I saw an interesting article that related Adam & Eve to the rise of sapience. In that theory, the marriage partners for Adam & Eve are those just below the threshold, though the article writer was clear that since we really don’t have a good definition of “sapience,” saying someone is just below a threshold that we’re not sure exists isn’t a very clear point. But anyway. Adam & Eve are the True Human concept, and they marry their kids to the group that they just beat to the finish line. No consanguinity issues in that version.
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Thanks for the clarification.
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Is it really theologically important? Or is it a tempting but insoluble, fruitless theological hair-split?
We can assume there were no “pre-Fall” kiddies because none before Cain was mentioned, but many–most?–of the Patriarchs’ kids went unmentioned (by name) in the Bible. Cain and Seth both founded important genealogies; that may be why their names (and genealogies) were among the few recorded.
We can assume there WERE “pre-Fall” kiddies because we–I, anyway–assume Adam & Eve had all the same physicality we have today (yeah, bellybuttons and all) and would have discovered the same physiological responses–and subsequent Fruitful Multiplication–as any adolescents “out behind the barn” today.
I assume The Author knew that Satan would sabotage the Church, the Bible, and everything else that looked worth sabotaging, and get us arguing about Angelic Pinheads and stones too heavy to lift. So He made the Message–boiled down in Matthew 22:35-40–simple enough and redundant enough to survive that.
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Actually, concupiscence was a consequence of the Fall.
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I think the preternatural gifts of mankind, prior to the Fall, would have let them deliberately conceive children if they had had relations.
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I tend to think the original sin is believing we are God, which is consistent with our hostesses position here. “For God doth know that in what day soever you shall eat thereof, your eyes shall be opened: and you shall be as Gods, knowing good and evil.”
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I’d say the Original Sin was Pride, expressed as an insistence–Satan’s first, then the rest of us–on being the Alpha, second to nobody.
Nowhere in the Bible is it recorded that Satan muttered “You’re not the boss of me” but I’d bet big on it.
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Uh…y’all are aware that those are just characters in a fantasy story, right? That in reality the 7 billion people living on Earth today are not all descended from one man and one woman created by magic 6,000 years ago?
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Picture the results if you take a trip to Saudi Arabia and ask to go on the hajj, because it’s no big deal if an unbeliever visits Mecca, after all Mohammed didn’t hear God, it was just a fantasy story.
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Also, while my church allows for evolution “Intelligent design”…. I’ve been more sure than I am now that it was allegorical or a fantasy.
Look, it’s 20th century thinking, too …. thin.
Elements of the story show up in every culture including totally isolated ones. I mean REALLY isolated ones. The tree and the tempting and… Sometimes it’s a good thing, sometimes bad, and sometimes the tree is a portal between wolds.
BUT when people who have no concept of numbers above 5 or concept of time tell a story that rhymes, I start worrying and wondering what is really happening.
And there’s bits of weird stuff in our DNA. One mother, two mothers, a dozen mothers, let’s call the whole thing off.
Does this mean I view the story as literal? No. But its keyed in to something VERY deep in the human brain, which might just be the way our brains are made.
Is the story as told? N– No. I don’t think so, simply because I don’t think our language has the words for what actually happened. So it gets filtered through the words of agricultural pastoralists and frankly little more than jumped apes with no concept of time.
You see why the congruence in symbols worries me?
Did the story only happen in the very design of our minds?
I don’t know. It’s not only above my paygrade, its’ zooming by overhead.
Hey, I believe because I want to believe. But as Heinlein put it, if the one cranking the lever of the world is the cat goddess of Papua New Guinea, I have no objections so long as the cranking doesn’t stop and I don’t come back as a mouse.
BUT the certainty that it’s all fantasy? That’s simplistic.
At any rate, given the history of scientific atheism, only outdone in blood and charnnel by Islam, (Yes, yes, wars of religion. But those throughout history, at least for Christianity were secular wars working through religion. And anyway atheism outdid the body count in 100 years.) I have atheist adopted family members (Hi Deej, Hi Sean) and I respect their conclusions while disagreeing. But I wouldn’t push it under any circumstances on people not thus inclined. Truly. Not worth the body count.
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((shrug))
If I wanted to explain Cosmogenesis and Terragenesis to a bunch Bronze-agers with no literacy higher math (presumably anybody who ran any kind of business was at least somewhat conversant with arithmetic), the first parts of Genesis wouldn’t be a bad start.
If He wants to encode that kind of stuff in our brains, well, it’s His design project, after all.
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As I pointed out, some of the tribes that have these elements aren’t even conversant with “business” so the people who encoded the Bible were somewhat more advanced than the average.
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I consider the “Garden Of Eden” story to be allegorical.
The Fall happened and we’re the descendants of the humans who Fell.
G*d is telling the story of how our ancestors Fell.
He’s not telling the story of the Non-Fallen (humans or otherwise).
Yes, I suspect that some humans didn’t Fall and there may be created beings (out there) that also didn’t Fall.
Of course, I really doubt that we’ll meet the Non-Fallen beings. 😉
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I’m really skeptical on aliens…. I don’t even know why. BUT I hold no hatred for those who write them. Heck, I’m re-reading Space Station Noir….
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But but… I thought your Shifters were descendants of Aliens!!!! [Crazy Grin]
Of course, it’s reasonable IMO to be skeptical of aliens. After all, we haven’t met any of them … yet. 😉
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Heck, frame it as something as utterly basic as “would it work for world building in fiction.”
“K, well, we’ll show that this is false because it claims that very far back there were two perfect genetic donors, so that gives us one perfect Y and three perfect X, in a system that is known to mutate and introduce errors all the time, so much so that we use it to try to calculate time to shared ancestry. We can show that is absolutely false because if you combine the mutated to introduce error forms too closely, it causes massive health issues. This is clearly rational and absolute proof that the original perfect copies couldn’t exist.”
Oh come on!
It’s like the reaction to various theories of Intelligent Design. It’s not, “alright, can we find a way to measure this? Do those arguments hold water, are they internally consistent? Can they be tested against reality?”
Nope! It’s full on Arrogant Young Master scenery chewing time– YOU DARE!??!
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That’s the reason I don’t like the Xianxia/Cultivation genre: Those young masters are so incredibly annoying, even as characters. I’d never thought about actual people in those terms; you’re not wrong.
That’s one reason that I find agnosticism acceptable – I even am one on some days – but atheism ridiculous. The atheist believes that he is smarter than billions of other humans, living and dead. He’s most likely (but not certainly) wrong.
What I’ve always found particularly interesting about Genesis is that the order is _almost_ right. Lambda CDM is not having a good year, so perhaps matter did come before light – we just don’t know, yet.
BTW: 6000 years is a straw-man these days. The number of people who believe the world was created thousands of years ago ranks with flat earthers and white supremists.
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So? Fanatical believers in a delusion can be very dangerous. That doesn’t make the delusion true.
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I’m going to point out religion is on forbidden topics for a reason, Imaginos.
And that I’m on four hours of sleep and for reasons my governor is good and gone, okay?
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Piss off with your unsupported and irrational demands we all bow to your beliefs.
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Serious question, Imaginos: How aware are you that you have presented a cartoonish straw man mischaracterization of Christian epistemology?
I don’t want to fire up that ancient argument. If that really is your sincere understanding of the Bible, it sure won’t be me who changes your mind.
It just seems out of place and out of character. If I’d read that on some random Disqus thread I’d just eyeroll about “ignorance? malice? feeble humor? all the above?” and move on, but seeing it here, and coming from you, it’s harder to just walk on by.
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The “ancient universe” hypothesis is based on a great deal of supposition from assumptions. For example, “Radioactive decay is truly constant over extended time.” Not that “rate of expansion of the universe” is now assumed to have changed significantly in separate epochs. Back to decay, the assumption of a start of X% and thus from there 13.? billion years is an assumption. Carbon-14 is our best “clock” and it doesn’t work past 50k years.
I recently read somewhere of a proposed multiple-bang hypothesis, which explains why there seems to be a lateral drift of chunks of the universe from a certain point of view.
Odd that the harder I study those cosmological beginnings, the more I see things lining up with Genesis. The “Bang” very quickly went dark, until enough bang-origin hydrogen condensed unto clouds, thus a gravitic crunch to ignition and “Let there be (star)light.”
Or, if one notes our own solar origin a mere 4.5 billion ago (of 13+), then there would have been formation of rocky/icy stuff prior to the solar furnace igniting. Land and the deep?
Where did all the elements come from? H to Fe is fairly straightforward in the theories,. Beyond Fe gets weird fast. Now we are told that supernovas dont make much gold, for example, but collisions of mutual-orbit neutron stars do. That is a big reduction in processing, for a much higher yeild per event.
He doesnt lie. Nor deceive. We get stuff wrong all the time. Misunderstand. Misinterpret. Mis-observe. The entire Bible can be literally true and not contradict a single thing in Nature. Because your assumptions and hypotheses can be very, very wrong.
And now we get to quantum mechanics, extraordinarily unlikely events that -must- have happened to produce current state and observations, and the denial that “miracles” happen.
(reaching for another big can of worms and my trusty P-38 opener)
DNA is a marvelously compact and functional information technology. Every known living thing uses it to live. The universe of 13-ish billion years, or our mere 4-ish billion below boiling water surface temps, is multiple orders of magnitude to -young- to explain where all the information in current DNA came from, if it is entirely from happenstance and random. And life bloomed almost the minute the earth’s surface could support it. -Where- did that info to “make stuff into self-replicating cells” come from? Sua sponte? Miraculously?
One’s assumptions of start conditions and mechanisms are not more privileged than anyone else’s. What can you/me/we/they actually prove? Not much. Not yet. -Prove-, not assert. I say designed based on -evidence-. Made to plan based on -result-. I see the Maker’s toolmarks -everywhere-.
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All the evidence we have found points to a universe over 13 billion years old, and an Earth over 4 billion years old. That the strong and weak nuclear forces have remained consistent over that time. Do you have any evidence that they’re not? Other than “Some old stories say so!”?
We have observed rapid changes in DNA in response to environmental influence. Look what we’ve done with dogs in just a few thousand years. Where is your evidence that it’s impossible for evolution to produce the observed genetic diversity in 4 billion years?
Evolution is an emergent property arising from the interaction of inheritance with variation and a hazardous environment that kills some of the organisms before they reproduce. That’s all it takes to explain life as we know it.
I follow the evidence as it exists. I don’t try to make up evidence to fit some preconceptions.
———————————
If reality fails to conform to your theories, it’s not the universe that’s wrong.
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Calling religion argument and sharpening the chancla.
You don’t sharpen chanclas? Sucks to be you.
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Wait a minute, aren’t sharpened chanclas prohibited by the Geneva Convention? 🤣
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Hoytco is not a signatory.
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Man changing dog supports design over happenstance.
The rate of expansion of the universe should be constant, but it isnt. “Dark matter” is a fudge factor.
Hm. An unseen something, making a change? Sounds familiar.
The forces did change. During that hypothesized first few moments, things went through multiple phases changes, and forces decoupled. Matter itself came about from vastly higher energy state.
I say to a design. No possible way we randomly hit jackpot after jackpot of happenstance selection of perfect constants that -just- happen to allow the next phase. It’s tuned. Perfectly. The primordial conditions produced -just- enough of the right elements to produce fast-living hypergiant stars to produce the next population of longer lived metalized supernova to produce our third generation star with rocky bits, upon which life originated almost to the moment temperatures fell below “disintigrate protein”.
Wow. That’s quite a run of “luck”. Miraculous, even.
Or, He made it to spec, and here we are.
Toolmarks. Everywhere. Proof piles up with every observation. Insufficient time for true random life occurace to current complexity in 4 or even 14 billion years. Not without “help”.
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“But myths are lies, even though lies breathed through silver.” — CS Lewis.
“No,” said Tolkien. “They are not.”
Conversation recounted by a witness, the night Tolkien brought Lewis back to Christianity.
Imaginos, so many of the good things are because we believe in myths as told by mortals. How much more, from a Myth that is True.
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“these children will be made comfortable and left to die comfortably… for their own good”
Yep. That’s the whole f-ing argument in a nutshell.
And Leftists wonder why we mock them.
It’s all a lie, of course, the real reason is money. They will be left to die because we don’t want to pay to keep them. And we don’t want to pay because really we stole all the healthcare money and we don’t want all you Normies to find out it’s gone.
So those people can just die, because we find that convenient this week. Maybe next week something else will be convenient. Like they’ll be forced to live so we can sell their precious bodily fluids and steal that money too. (Never a bad time to drop a Dr. Strangelove reference.) ~:D
Personally I feel a tax cut could be beneficial. Like we cut the taxes so profoundly that scoundrels leave government and go somewhere else to steal.
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Yuuup.
In my childhood I wondered why convenience-of-the-mother abortion didn’t imply a principle that equally licenses convenience-of-the-rapist murders of victims who might otherwise press charges.
I think a lot of left policy claims come down to obvious stupidity or dishonesty on the part of the people getting income from making the claims. Or, that is my perception.
That either people do not respect me enough to work towards convincing dishonesty, or they don’t respect themselves.
It actually turns out that I am really wacky at estimating how other people think and perceive.
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There is a troll in the counter argument that the best of chattel slavery was less awful than the worst of the behavior to be distinguished.
But, you would obviously deliver the troll most effectively by hiding the sample selection biases in your presentation.
There’s a basic freaking problem in post industrial-revolution societies of academics and henwits learning to see people as most fundamentally statistical aggregates, instead of as individuals.
The ‘caring’ that orients to the symbolic magic gestures about the alleged aggregates is very compatible with an indifference or a sadism towards actual individuals.
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Not only is it functionally the same thing as chattel slavery, it’s possibly a good bit worse than that. The thing that keeps coming to my mind with respect to MAID (and diagnoses such as “persistent vegetative state”) is this:
Organ harvesting.
What incentives might or might not exist to lead one with the authority to treat people as things to the (coincidentally, naturellement…pardonnez-moi, I just rolled my eyes clean out of my head) most, uh, remunerative conclusion?
I’m taking steps to make sure anyone who needs to know knows beyond the shadow of a doubt that I most certainly do not consent to organ donation of any kind, as things currently stand. I am neither widget nor Uighur, to be disposed of as livestock.
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Rather like the covidiocy, with hospitals being paid by the case and the difference between died of and died with.
It took about two minutes for Italy to decide that anyone over 40 should be sent home to die, and about that long for various governments to decide that if a life is too expensive to maintain they have the right to end it.
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Same.
Used to have organ donor on my driver’s license. Last renewal, that was removed.
I’m O+. Used to donate blood. Medication is such, I cannot anymore.
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In China, a lot of young people apparently disappear mysteriously, shortly after getting blood type and genetic tests.
This is mandated at every school, including at elementary schools. Maybe even at daycare centers and preschools.
And there are apparently kidnap vans driving around, making people mysteriously disappear.
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So THAT’s where the looney lefties get the idea it is happening HERE. Usual Commie Projection; accuse your adversaries of what you are ACTUALLY doing.
[Re: kidnap vans…]
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always, pretty much.
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I have to keep reminding myself that whatever nightmares we assume about the CCP, are likely not even close to the depth-of-horror reality, as exemplified by what we found when the Soviets cashed it in.
Not even -close- are we to the depth of that accounting of horror…. But we may be “soon”.
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It is unfortunate that Beijing is not downstream of 3G. A small scale Great Flood to wash away their crimes would be just.
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“The government giveth, the government taketh away,”
Blessed be the name of the government.
/duck
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/duck /goose.
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IDENTIFIED!
UP!
ON THE WAY!
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You misspelled CURSED.
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Some one having a fish fry?”
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There is a section in Matthew 22:34-40 that speaks to this (NET Translation which free to use)
The second (basically a paraphrase of the Golden Rule) is also fundamentally Sir Terry’s don’t treat others as things (as unless you are seriously screwed up you don’t treat yourself as a thing). Note that Jesus hangs all the Law (i.e. the Torah) and all of the Prophets (who are sent basically as arbiters of the law) on these principles.
And yes the Brahmandarin types really want to return to an essentially feudal system with the most “elevated” types (i.e. them) as the Lords and Masters. The difference between a serf and a chattel slave is sufficiently nitpicking to be indistinguishable from the slave/serf’s point of view. Somehow our UK, Austrailian and Canadian (as well as European) cousins have traded a little security for their rights and as Mr Franklin suggested, now deserve neither. To return to biblical references, they have like Esau traded their birthright for a bowl of pottage (or at least some lame healthcare and an ability not to be offended). I feel sorry for them, but honestly, we need to avoid that here. May their chains rest lightly on them until they realize what they have done. With luck they will not be permanently serfs, though I fear their time to rectify that is quickly running out. We did a lot to save their sorry asses last century (two hot wars and a cold one) and I fear some of what we did is part of the root cause of the dependence they show.
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A couple of weeks ago I realized a lot of “christian” websites were leaning only on “love your brother as yourself”– and completely ignoring the “Love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, and all your soul, and all your mind” part.
It fixes this:
If you don’t love God, first and completely– you can warp yourself around all sorts of ways to indulging horrible things as “loving.”
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Well, yes – from the view of society and government this rings true. However, there is also a micro view from the point of an individual and their unique and specific situation. Example: I recently got a diagnosis of colon cancer and it’s likely spread (liver and local area of colon). So, I get to have surgery, chemo and other fun stuff. Thus I very well may need to go from an independent life in my own home situation to a “living center” with assisted and long term care options.
I’ve researched these over the last couple of years as (now deceased) wife and I knew it could be a situation we would need to address. My conclusion, after recent updates to said research is that you are checking in to a geriatric Stalag where a whole bunch of individual rights and self determination are curtailed. The fact you need the help/support is the trap and the organizations providing said service – even the religious non-profit types – have “rules” and you have to go along to get along or get kicked to the curb… in some cases very literally, no place to live and “government” will simply put you someplace and good luck.
While such living arrangements can and do work – for independent thinkers and those who highly value individual responsibility and choice it’s a very bitter pill to swallow. Sigh…
Time will tell for my case as I’m just starting out (under the knife and chemo) the end of the month and should have a better idea of how independent I can be and for how long in the next couple of months. I want to be able to just deal with it on my own but reality says I’m going to need “help” and this is the way it works. Thanks for letting me rant. More later.
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So sorry for your diagnosis. Wishing you all the best.
Regarding assisted living. Look into in-home care.
We have an assisted living component of our life insurances (1/2 benefit value). But it is old enough we do not know if payment would include in-home, which is a “newer” concept from when we took them out. As it is, the values limit us to end-of-life care.
FWIW, BIL had to go into medical “assisted” living briefly (a few weeks). He couldn’t wait to get out. Makes hospital care look inviting. For reasons, they, his wife and him, had to fight to get him home. He is 79 this spring.
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Thanks. I am supposed to have some ‘short term’ home health care nurse that will “stop by” after I am home that insurance provides. I have a bunch of meetings / appointments next week where I should be able to get details and specifics. From the initial sound of it I should be able to “take care of myself” in a couple of weeks and should only need some initial support at first. We will see!
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I’m so sorry. And yes, unfortunately sometimes it’s needed.
You’re added to the prayer list.
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Wonderful, thought provoking post. Do people though in the modern world, or any time for that matter have an advantage by being bad ? I don’t think so. People like that have a tendency to die alone horribly. I don’t mean karma or the cheap version that’s passed around the internet. I mean the working out of things over a period of time. As a thought : someone said revolutions devour their own children.
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They do a lot of damage on the way to that death.
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This, oh man, this.
I’d have a lot less life-threatening stress and more financial security if my parents had been even a fraction less evil.
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Unfortunately they do. But I think sometimes we have to think theologically, meaning yes people suffer at the hands of evil. We can choose not to do evil. (I mean the average person.) or do a little good.
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“Forgive me, for what I have done, and what I have failed to do.”
Resisting evil– as effectively as possible– is part of good.
There isn’t really a “not do evil” option, you either go for the good or you don’t; everything has costs, yes, but that goes all around.
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Yes I agree, but you expressed it better.
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I’m glad you think so– I’ve been poking a lot at both the devaluating of upkeep and of treating good as a sider, opposite of evil, with a spot in the middle that isn’t either– rahter than like light, and “dark” is just the lack of light– on messing us up.
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Evil often lies in -both- directions off the path we were set. Drift too far to either side of that right path and into the rut you go.
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One of the ways of defining sin is that it is the sacrifice of a greater good for a lesser one.
A very easy to grasp example is that eating is good– sating your hunger, that is a good thing, needful for life.
That doesn’t mean I can shoot you in the head to make chili and say “but it’s for a good cause!”
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I’d really like to disagree, being a “do nothing” sort of person, but I cannot.
Technically, “all it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing” leaves out neutral men, but the point holds if one replaces “good” with “other”.
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Does it help any to realize that “don’t make it worse” is a form of doing something?
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“neutral” requires everyone to agree to it. Which is unlikely. Usually it means “saved for later, after the hard part”.
If the notional bigbad (or bossgood) says “you are either actively with me, or you are against me”, then neutrality doent exist.
Notice Belgium in the 20th century. So much for neutrality. Switzerland has much rougher terrain and better shots. But a Euro-victorious Reich eats Switzerland in a generation. By seige and gas if needed.
Obscurity and inofensiveness are not real neutrality. Alas.
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Think of “doing good” as upkeep on a garden.
Only a total idiot would try to say that maintenance tasks don’t count as growing the garden, only planting and adding plants does.
Keeping the plants alive and healthy is gardening– and so upkeeping the good is also good.
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And yet…..
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:pats the soap box: Yeah.
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It’s the idea that if it’s not illegal it’s ethical, and anything goes if it reaches your goal. (Sounds almost… liberal)
The individual I am thinking of has millions, a position of social authority, and when confronted with proof of wrongdoing most people say “But he does so many good things,” as if that makes up for it. He’s surrounded by sycophants who won’t question anything he says because if they do he’ll destroy them.
Will he die alone? I have no way of knowing. But in the meantime he has so many people who owe him that he’s basically untouchable. He functions by putting those he can’t control in legally vulnerable positions that he can topple at a word. Doing favors for the rest so they owe him (“Owe” being a short hop from “owned”).
I don’t see this individual at any kind of disadvantage. The psychology that makes it possible has been around as long as humanity. Some day he’ll have to account for his actions, but at the moment?
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As you said as long as humanity has been around. But if he is surrounded by sycophants. He will never hear the information he needs to protect himself or to grow.
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You come close to using the same words I tend to use to describe evil. In fact you might have in one spot. It’s the desire to control others. Is that any different than treating other people as things? I’m not sure, but it’s definitely along the same path.
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I apologize for the multiple postings. I just don’t know what I can do about it.
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It’s fine. WordPress does that periodically
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For what it is worth, no one with any understanding of WP is blaming you.
But we may stand back to avoid getting splashed (grin).
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I apologize for the multiple postings. I just don’t know what I can do about it.
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If there is anything good, evil must either own it, or destroy it.
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That goes a long way to explain why WordPress often does what it does ….
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You come close to using the same words I tend to use to describe evil. In fact you might have in one spot. It’s the desire to control others. Is that any different than treating other people as things? I’m not sure, but it’s definitely along the same path.
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You come close to using the same words I tend to use to describe evil. In fact you might have in one spot. It’s the desire to control others. Is that any different than treating other people as things? I’m not sure, but it’s definitely along the same path.
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Something big is going down in Iran. Internet, telephone, etc,, ar cut-off, not just VPN, everything. IRGC in the street and they’ve been shooting. Last pictures out show large crowds of protestors.
If you pray, do. If you don’t then it might be a good time to start.
I suspect the junior officers are watching g the sergeants and the sergeants are watching the men to see whether they’ll obey the orders to open fire. If they don’t, the regime is done,
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The ones sent out to fire into crowds of kids will be the Arab hezbolla and Syrian mercs. Too much of a chance that line infantry troops or even IRGC will see relatives in the crowd and have unit-wide weapons malfunctions that prevent accurate fire.
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That’s what the ayatollahs did in the last round – sent in the Arabs, the Basij, to do the dirty work.
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Imagery on X sneaking out around the nationwide cell and internet blackout shows what are reported to be Basiji buildings and vehicles engulfed in flames. Huge crowds are shown in multiple locations nationwide.
Re that blackout, rumor also has it Elon quietly enabled Starlink for Iran earlier today.
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And the crowds are chanting “long live the Shah” and putting up the old Shah-era Iranian flag on statues and buildings.
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in Tehran, doubtless. Foreign mercs protecting the tyrant re very common — Maduro and his Cubans for one. I don’t know if they have enough of them to cover the whole country though. Hope not.
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Twitter is noting the BBC is steadfastly ignoring events in Iran.
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BBC would be heartbroken were the mullahs to fall.
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The Beeb is now reporting America and Israel are behind it, or part of it.
Just how much kompromat do the Islamists have on the British aristocracy, anyway?
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With their long history of antisemitism? They don’t need kompromat. They’ll go along with it anyway.
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And there’s never been a lot of love in the Brit aristocratic classes for the US anyway. They tolerated being rescued from the Germans twice, but I think the resentment goes back further. And of course their aristocracy was thoroughly infiltrated and compromised by the Soviets, so as in other places they still have that raging memetic infection as well.
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Forget the aristos – the kompromat is on Sir Humphrey and his ilk
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I’ve been wanting to joke about the CIA being behind stuff for a few days. (I do not think the CIA is behind it, and it did not strike me as being funny enough.)
But, basically, the UK university crowd needs to cry CIA/Mossad, for reasons of their own emotional needs over their position in their own regime.
There’s a bunch of vaguely commie PhDs in the UK, who think that they will be the intellectual vanguard of the proletariat, and basically have triaged their place in society on appeasement.
They are very resistant to the idea that the chowderheads in academia have basically disproven the intellectual vanguard, by being too spitefully hateful of the ‘uneducated’.
If the CIA is behind everything, then they can imagine American Democrats saving their asses.
They want the emotional and status signaling that they have used their whole lives to continue to work the magic in the future.
Israel has helped box in the Iranian regime, the US intervention in Venezuela helped, the Ukraine probably helped by warring on Russia, and the Iranian regime inflicted a lot of its own problems. US forces were definitely trying to help the regime fall, see, for ex, the open fact of starlink.
But, the UK intelligentsia are basically living in a world of spirits, and need to have regime change caused by witches, so that their own witch doctors of ‘international cooperation’ can protect them.
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College folks are by definition Bourgeois.
Pretending to be Communist will not save them, come the Revolution. They are Marx-Heretics of the worst sort. The Khmer Rouge demonstrated a certain glee at demonstrating this.
-Proletariat- Revolution.
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Actually, it did report yesterday. To round derision when it posted its story to X.
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Maduro’s foreign Praetorians and magic missiles didn’t help all that much, eh?
How close are our Carriers to Iran at the moment? Those effers are -way- faster than folks think.
And Trump -has- been waring the MadMullas for some time, eh?
Lord, let those folks free themselves from those WeirdBeards. For then, perhaps, they might realize how to -keep- themselves free.
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It really, really looks like the regime is done. But it is not going to go peacefully, alas.
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Our darling moppets here won’t either. Be aware.
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Fully aware. It looks to me like the governor of Minnesota is now in insurrection (the real kind) against the federal government.
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To the degree that such actually happens here, tells me how close China is to falling apart. The CCP will do -anything- to keep us too busy to even look helpful to a new Dynasty in China.
A toast to a new West Taiwan! (grin)
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Hmm.
I’m unclear on what fractions I would assign. I still think that there is a chance of Walz just being that stupid, but PRC direction also makes a fair amount of sense.
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He is unlikely to be aware of his handler’s true allegiance. Probably ignorant he is handled. Not a bright bulb at all.
The proper pro spymaster -never- reveals the true name of the boss.
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‘Tis devoutly to be wished.
May they win an end to their torment.
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That’s my feel as well.
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Elon turned on free Starlink, and Tousi TV is getting video from various cities in Iran. The people are all out, and they are fighting back. Also burning down lots of government buildings, and some Soleimani statues.
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The Iranian Kurds are also out in the streets, and also calling for the Crown Prince to become Shah.
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Yeah, some git was in Steve Stirling’s Facebook last week dismissing the Kurds and any Sunni Muslims as too weak to be relevant.
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Kurds bet the strongest horse pretty reliably, and as close to past-post as they can arrange. If they are out playing, someone is rather confident of result.
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On a somewhat related note (calling on local militia to resist the operations of Fe(de)ral forces), it seems ‘my’ governor (I didn’t vote for the knucklehead) is preparing to call up the National Guard to stymie ICE actions in Minnesota.
IIRC, when the governor of S. Carolina (a Democrat – Hmmm . . .) demanded the U.S. troops at Ft. Sumter (enforcing tariffs – again Hmmm . . .) cease their activities and leave the area it was an initial success but in the long run did *not* turn out well for his countrymen.
Does Tampon Timmay really want to trip off another Civil War? Despite his calls for peaceful protest, his referring to Gettysburg & Pickett’s Charge as analogs for his current stance make one wonder: Does he really not know that ‘his’ side eventually ended up LOSING that contest?
Sorry if I’m treading on sensitive ground, but while History may not repeat with martial beat, sometimes it rhymes . . .
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For a guy who almost certainly thinks that all White Southerners are complete screaming racists, ol’ Timwalz is sure acting awfully…Confederate.
John C. Calhoun is smiling down on you, Timwalz.
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John C Calhoun would eat this clown for breakfast without salt.
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Yes, yes they want a civil war. It’s their last chance.
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Morons who, even for theory obsessives, have a deeply wrong theoretical understanding.
I started studying this family of issues many years ago as a young lunatic, and it basically is not as straightforward as almost any ‘gold star for repeating teacher’ would assume.
I can be substantially wrong, and still more correct than the likes of Walz, Cortez, or Newsome.
UCMJ, electoral fraud, and that we are not the 1860s any more, and combat effective units (if available) can deploy faster. Even if we don’t have the manpower to project power internally, if it is idjits who cannot get anything to ignite, we can maybe keep things damped down. We probably won’t have the window that was available in 1860 for states to raise regiments. A conventional war broken down along 24 governors and 26 governor lines is not happening.
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Two more people shot in Portland. Appear to be Tren de Aragua (?) related, but that won’t matter to the Believers.
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I think they’re trying to spin up a mob.
I suspect they’re going to make it so their folks go “Wait, will I get shot for this?”
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They think they’re going to get Saint Floyd Summer of Love 2.0.
What they missed is that this time Trump is on to their nonsense, and he’s done a pretty good start of clearing out the saboteurs from his first time around.
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Also, its flipping January in Minnesota.
They’ve now set up an “autonomous zone.” Chill, friends, chill.
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I hope that, this time, someone enforces the law: engaging in an “autonomous zone” constitutes renunciation of American citizenship.
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Trump nuked the money tree that fueled the 2020 fiasco.
And every buck that flows into financing this current fiasco is identifying what to zap next. Idiots.
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Timmy is likely so willfully misinformed that he has no clue what those words he may have said meant.
I don’t think drawing conclusions from the first ACW to the hypothetical second is forbidden.
But, there are not a lot of things to say beyond a) civil wars suck b) anyone who thinks that they can set one off and ride it to victory is probably very mentally challenged c) the trick in the US case is to reason backwards from the improbable victory and improbable ability to stick the peace of the first, and conclude that c1) the trick to winning the peace is to pull together a coalition c2) the way you get American coalitions in civil wars is by not pissing people off with evil atrocities, and by letting the other faction alienate the middle c3) absolutely do not start the civil war d) It will suck, and it will be much more surprising and much less remunerative than any of the optimists and ‘strategists’ think.
Walz, we already had evidence of evil and of being severely mentally challenged. In hindsight, one wonders if he actually did order the schizoid guy to carry out political assassinations on behalf of Tim Walz and the Democratic Party.
What happens next? No way of knowing.
We can infer that some of the opposition centers of gravity for behavior have been getting psychological hits for decades off of perceiving theory instead of perceiving reality and perceiving individuals. We can infer that many of them are cruel and evil and wildly overconfident from past success. The ghost dancing model (stressed groups double down on past ‘successes’) seems to apply. It isn’t too likely that many of the leaders are going to hit rock bottom and voluntarily start ‘drying’ themselves out.
But, I think a lot of other folks are very pissed off, and still willing to gamble on peaceful, non-violent remedies.
I’m not at all sure that Walz is mentally competent to stand criminal trial. If so, he will get himself into a lot more trouble, and may need to be institutionalized anyway.
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The ACW had a very large chunk of real estate and population in a discrete area.
Not this time.
This is a -city- phenomenon, not region. And only a handful of cities are really in play. And it is -way- too easy to just cut off much of the supplies and wait for the Leftroid nature to sort itself out. In 3 days they will be screaming. In 3 weeks they might be mostly on fire. In three months, most likely extinct.
And the horror of -that- outcome will scar us unlike anything before. “The gutted cities era” is going to -suck-.
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As bad as the ACW was (and remember which side of the Mason-Dixon I live on, we got the worst of it, heh), ACW II: Electric Boogaloo would be a thousand times worse. It won’t be blue and gray lining up in a field and grapeshotting each other. It’ll be the professional agitators finding out what happens when you antagonize those who want to be left alone, with the looters and the vultures picking clean the bones. Srebernica, not Shiloh.
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Can’t speak to others, but being (with other family) on the edge of one of those cities, having three nieces in the middle of one of the major ones (Portland), other family, a sister, a cousin on the edge of two other cities (Portland/Vancouver metro), this would suck. No, we do not have the supplies on hand. Or at least not enough. Cousins would be okay (farmers). Not the rest of us. Especially the nieces who currently reside in downtown area apartments.
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That “call out the Guard” crap stopped neither Eisenhower nor Kennedy from enforcing civil rights laws. (Nor did militia stop Lincoln. Nor Washington.) There might be some disagreement in the MN NG over who to obey. I rather doubt any significant number of NG wearing “US ARMY” tapes on uniforms will disobey “President says: stand down”. The 82nd and USMC will obey the President. So will the heavy divisions, Delta, etc.
There are easier ways to leave office, mister Walz. Choose wisely. Please.
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Tim, oh, Tampon Tim. You are not George Wallace standing in the doorway, sir. Wallace had a much nicer accent.
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It would be the FIRST time he chose wisely.
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I want to see Tampon Timmy leave office in shackles. Is that too much to ask? 😛
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I had a feeling a year ago that we were going to have a replay of 1989, maybe with better global results, last year. My feeling may have been early, but is turning out to be correct. Hoping to see the same sort of thing in Mainland China, especially now that the heads of the PRC know that trying to take Taiwan is suicide.
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I think you’ve nailed down a basic fallacy of leftist ideology (and every other would be philosophy that seeks to rule over others). They have no problem with eliminating anyone who isn’t useful to them because they aren’t really real. The push of MAID and other such schemes is just an extension of the idea that government chooses who is useful and who can be eliminated. The inevitable outgrowth of government controlled medicine. Every other scheme from UBI, social welfare, etc. seems to be based on that idea. They are real and they get to choose, everyone else is of no consequence.
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If you really dig into some of the pre-1900s German philosophers, and back to Rousseau (their inspiration), you hit the idea that individuals are the property of the State, or the Volk, or the General Will. To obey the state is the highest freedom, and the state, or the tribe, the People, has the right to determine how the individual will live, and what role he will fulfill. That might be as a soldier, or a leader, or (modern China?) as spare parts for the wise leaders.
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How very… tribal… of them.
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TxRed, I know you’ve read this Kipling, but for any who haven’t….
https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poem/poems_deathbed.htm
The quotes are from Kaiser Wilhelm II during his reign and after.
The responses? Let’s just say that Kipling was responding as a father who lost his son.
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Hence the argument for term limits to at least cut down a bit on the non-empathic master class that tends toward positions of power. Frankly, Representatives and Senators should be limited to no more than two terms in each office, the same as the President. That still means they could conceivably do 2 in all three positions, for a total of 24 years in federal elected offices. Heaven only knows how much time they spend in state level elected positions; pay for those varies greatly among the different states.
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Unfortunately unless you mandate that EVERY bureaucrat MUST be fired on the day of the switchover, and that they don’t get to serve again for 20 years, you JUST empower the bureaucrats and the deep state.
And if you managed to turn it all over, our enemies would know we were all trying to find our ass for two months out of every four years.
Term limits is one of those things that sounds lovely, but is a trap.
The solution is to create a culture of term limits, one in which working your whole life in the public sector is looked down on.
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As a first step – repeal the Pendleton Act and return to Andrew Jackson’s “to the victor go the spoils”. That would make sustaining a Deep State with policies a majority of voters detested literally impossible, and return control of the government to elected officials.
It would also mean that government workers aren’t hired for their ability to do the job … but we’re already in that situation, thanks to the “disparate impact” tort being applied to scrap the civil service exams. We have thus managed to combine the disadvantages of the spoils system and the system the Pendleton Act created.
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Michael, as we’ve seen, you would also have to cut down or out on the number of positions requiring Senate confirmation. Here’s a list from the US Senate site, and there’s about 1800 of them. Some of them have to get past multiple committees, which leaves lots of room for shenanigans.
https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/RL30959
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This. There’s a long, long line of pigs waiting for 536 troughs (the VP doesn’t get one, unless.) Term limits would just make the line move faster, while incentivising every pig to get while the getting’s good. It wouldn’t get us better pigs.
“Every complex problem has a simple solution–elegant, obvious, compelling, and wrong.”
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I truly think the democrats are in a panic over funding, if most of their corruption goes away, so does their paydays. As their politicians see it this is their final solution. Their slutty whores in the media just take it up the ass like always, ain’t that right Miss Jimmy Kimmel.
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They are in a panic over losing EVERYTHING. Funding, voterbase, the ability to fraud themselves into power, EVERYTHING.
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and, apparently a lot of deeply unwell types for whom social status as a way of hurting those around them is everything
Not all of them have the understanding and appetite to continue escalating, but they have made some difficult gambles, and sane people who really understood the current political situation would have long been very ready to ‘retire’.
I think that maybe the party insiders may have spun up Walz so that he would flame out and discredit Harris early, and so saner contenders could compete for 2028. However, this is almost certainly a crazy amount of ‘mirroring’ analytical error on my part.
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I have a hard time believing they weren’t trying to open up a gravy train for themselves, in the belief that they could rig the election again.
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I think you are probably matching the reality better than I did.
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To be clear, I was not saying you were wrong. You may be correct. Just expressing my difficulty with seeing it.
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Some of the time I get too excited, tunnel visiony, or fatigued.
Since then I have been doomscrolling twitter a bit much, so my jdugement is probably not improving this evening.
I did check Preston Byrne’s blog, and he reported another communication from the UK office of communication.
I’m probably going on break from this stuff until at least tomorrow afternoon, it is a little too fascinating.
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Truthfully I think Timmy would rather go to Prison for Insurrection rather than just plain ass fraud and theft. I am not worried about him starting any fighting himself, unless someone else loads the weapon for him…tee hee.
Is Sen. Mark Kelly going to advise the Minnesota National Guard on not following Illegal Orders?
What excuse does Minnesota Attorney General Ellison have for not catching the fraud, Bribes, err donations or did the Somali’s just disappear all his old girlfriends, I mean the ones he didn’t beat into submission?
Enquiring minds want to know…Tee Hee.
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One for Sarah if she hasn’t seen it elsewhere. It doesn’t quite fit with this thread but does with No Man’s Land.
Which anthologized writers and books get checked out most frequently from Seattle Public Library? (Phys.org, 8 Jan)
I’ll leave you to read the whole thing, it’s an interesting window on what real people actually like to read. SF is one of the most borrowed genres, and Ursula K. Le Guin is #1 of all authors. The Left Hand of Darkness comes in at #7 as the most borrowed book.
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LeGuin? REALLY??? That’s bizarre.
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I was curious how they got it down to 90 authors and found this after clicking through enough links
So it’s more like, “of the books taught as Amazingly Important and and Influential and thus very likely to be checked out by someone taking a class that uses this book, in the past 20 years, here’s how many were checked out.”
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That was my guess. “Books people don’t want to buy when they need them for class or book club.”
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That too. LG is on all the school reading lists.
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Along with snobs. LeGuin is very popular with people who want to be seen as intellectuals. So, okay, that makes more sense. Still, without looking, I would think Philip K. Dick was in the antho, too, being one of the few pulp SF writers approved by the snobs, and he’s much better than LeGuin, and easier to read except his worst books.
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but he’s male….
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So glad you posted this, because at like midnight yesterday I thought I should check if it was USA specifically, but decided to SLEEP….
Here’s a full list.
Maybe he was one of the guys they removed for the “26 new and exciting authors!” or whatever the typeface says.
https://search.library.wisc.edu/catalog/991013997486402129
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I’m fairly sure if LeGuin is legit the #1 it’s because the others are “young and upcoming sf authors” like…. Jemisin and Bradford and….
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Of their selection, yes.
I still wanna know where Heinlein is. Or Howard.
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Heinlein is nowhere. You have no idea how many panels I’ve been on that were “Heinlein, threat or menace?” Which considering his views on the sexual revolution, etc, seems odd. Until you realize how much emphasis he puts on liberty and rationality. They demonized him on the way to vanishing him. And they succeeded with the younger people.
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Maybe it’s the times we’re in at the moment, but that seems to rhyme with the whole “oh, no, you must be horribly upset that someone is able to effectively resist aggression!”
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depends on the selection!
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Putting on my sci-fi writer’s hat, the only way I could see a UBI working would be manufacturing technology that was so ubiquitous that every person was (and I feel like I am chewing a bit of aluminum foil here) effectively a citizen-shareholder, and the government was the business that we organized to handle the things that we need a government for.
The problem is that it would require technology that we might not have in a thousand years. Or we might get tomorrow. Who knows?
About any other alternative would be little more than a form of wealth-transfer from the proletariat to the cadres.
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The thing is if we can’t sell the shares, we don’t really own them — and too many people would sell them for quick cash.
This is another reason why leftist fantasies are doomed: they never bother to include saving up for the next injection of capital.
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The only idea I had was that you couldn’t sell your one, base share for any reason short of a conviction for treason. You could buy more shares and sell THOSE…but you could never sell the one base share that guaranteed you a tiny studio apartment (i.e. a 10’x10′ cube with a wet nook and folding bunk), basic entertainment (network TV and basic internet), “food” of some kind (there are people who would look at MREs with longing after a week of “food”), basic public transit, and basic medical care.
But I do agree that there were holes in the idea that needed plugging.
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You could probably take out a loan with payments equal to your dividends.
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The biggest flaw: “Vote for us and we’ll redefine basic!”
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Hard-coded requirement. You have a share-you had a place to live, food to eat, something to watch, and the ability to go places.
Nothing says it HAD to be comfortable. Nothing says that you can’t find something to do to earn more (and places exist for you to legally and otherwise earn more).
But like all ideas of the utopian mold, there is always issues that won’t make it practical in the real world.
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So part of the plan would be that “one share does NOT allow you a vote of any kind”. Make sure that’s hard coded too.
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Or. you can sell your share, renounce your citizenship and go live somewhere else.
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It is interesting to note, the last time the Democrats started a Civil War it was also about them losing their Monetary Power over cheap wages, I.E. Slavery. In truth what they are doing now is nothing more than Slavery by economic means. The whole welfare state is nothing more than Slavery by economic means. Do what we say, see who we say, say what we want, believe what we want, (Father’s out of the home creating feral children), or you lose your benefits/money/food. The more feral children you have, the more money you get. When others demand accountability, they scream Racism, Sexism, Classism, (And every other ISM you can imagine and some made up) and their cowardly whores/Sycophants in the media go along. And most of the people are stuck in the middle trying to keep their children from going feral from the influence of the other Feral children. Pray for sanity and keep your powder dry.
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Of course the cheap labor in this case is all the Illegal and Legal Immigrants and all those feral children they have created, both by welfare and indoctrination in their Marxist controlled Universities.
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Legal Immigrants meaning the H-1B Visa types not the Author of this post, Legal Immigration is needed, and good legal competition helps all.
The Illegals help to keep all those feral children, feral, by freezing them in place economically. While allowing those Illegals to take jobs that would allow those feral children to move out of poverty. If that happened the army those Democrats are counting on would disappear. It would disappear at the first real shooting anyway.
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You must have watched my yt video about feral children! :)
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They’re the Party of Slavery. After that, we’re quibbling over semantics.
Plantation, Collective, and who gets classified as a slave.
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OT, but worth sharing : “God is in control, but He doesn’t expect you to lean on a shovel and pray for a hole.”
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At the most fundamental level there are two ways to look at other people: Love or Utility. A Christian believes that a loving God created us, and the universe, and gave us freewill so that we could choose love. So every person has value and worth and taking life is a serious matter. The alternative is people are only valuable when they have utility to ME. Yes, Christians always fall short of perfect love, but they try. Unfortunately, liberals are very good at utility and have successfully murdered hundreds of millions in the name of utility…
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I have little hope of being able to find the essay, but “free will” vs “utility” reminds me of the libertarian observation that there are only two options for organizing society: an emphasis on persuasion or an emphasis on force.
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Saul Alinsky’s dedication to his book “Rules for Radicals” has been on my mind lately, where he dedicated the book to Lucifer, “the first rebel”.
I happen to be somewhat “rebellious” myself — so the idea of cheering on a rebel is kindof attractive — but I have to ask “just what was Lucifer rebelling against?”
Now, I am not fully aware of how general this doctrine is among general Christianity, but as a Latter-day Saint, my understanding is this: Our Heavenly Father wanted to give his children their agency, so they could act for themselves, and find their way back to him, and a Savior was provided to help us overcome our inevitable mistakes, if people accepted Him, and the Father would receive all the glory — and Lucifer wanted to ensure that all of us were saved, whether we wanted it or not, and that all the glory should go to him! Thus, Lucifer’s rebellion wasn’t one seeking for freedom; rather, it was seeking control over all of Creation.
I cannot help but reflect on how the cause that Saul Alinsky and his fellow rebels have embraced — they want to take control of everything and establish a Utopia, where everyone is subject to an “enlightened” leadership, for the collective good — whether they wanted it or not. With this understanding, it’s fitting that Saul Alinsky dedicates his book to Lucifer — but just as Lucifer wasn’t truly after freedom, but after power, Alinsky and his fellow “rebels” don’t seek for freedom, but for power over all of us.
I have also reflected on how few rebellions I can think of that have resulted in free societies. Medieval Iceland, founded by a tax dodger and a murderer. Switzerland, founded by a father unhappy to be forced to shoot an apple from his son’s head because some twit with power over him demanded it. America, established by people who just wanted representation in their own government. In each of these cases, people just wanted to be left alone, and the Powers that Be kept pushing them. Once they got their freedom, they created cultures that valued life, respected freedom, and overall tried their best to leave people alone, and only forcing people to do things for limited reasons (such as contract violations, or hurting or killing someone, or disturbing property, etc).
It’s funny, if you think about it, how all the people who want to “rage against the machine” are really raging against all those people who are just doing their own things, and are actively trying to create and control the very machine they say they are raging against!
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