Hyperion
1yr ago
Did you read anything I said or the Torah itself? I have no doubt they thought it meant morality. Morality meant following the covenant they made with a god. Moses wrote it down for them. That was their morality. I just reject it's truth, not that they thought it was morality.
Hyperion
1yr ago
No, I don't think a law against eating pork has any bearing on morality.
I get what you mean now and I reject the implications.
Moses, like all great thinkers, was both original and true. In that, what he said that was true wasn't original and what he said that was original wasn't true.
I prefer Zoroaster. I think laws against kicking pregnant dogs make much more sense morally, than laws against eating shrimp.
Hyperion
1yr ago
The entirety of the Mosaic law found in the Torah? Are you trying to make some kind of point with this question or do you somehow not know that?
Hyperion
1yr ago
You really get the impression that the hebrew god is worshipped because he is unfathomably powerful and terrifying rather than because he is some font of morality.
That's very explicit in the Old Testament especially the early parts. They make explicit covenants with that are about earthly rewards like having lots of descendants or being given possession of the promised land. There isn't anything about an afterlife better than that of a shade in Sheol.
God's punishments for breaking the covenant are earthly ones that usually involve bringing a foreign army against them. These stories of God's punishment mostly seem like post-hoc justifications for why Judah was defeated in battle and conquered despite having the support of the Lord of Hosts. They rationalize it as them having broken the covenant first.
This idea of God and the universe having a moral bent is something inserted later into Judaism through Zoroastrianism and Greek philosophy.
Hyperion
1yr ago
That is very much not democracy as envisioned in the constitution of the United States of America. There is a separation of powers and being elected president doesn't make you emperor. The legislature and courts determine the law. Power is deliberately separated and modeled after the Roman Republic, not the Empire.
Hyperion
1yr ago
Probably just the fact your diet of Chavez was from neutral commentators who ignored his theatrics to focus on the substance of his policy, something they took for granted. And leftist commentators who deliberately ignored his craziness; because, any alternative to capitalism is something to be lauded, no matter how terrible.
Anyone who actually pointed out the absurdities was written off as a bourgeoisie stooge or an American imperialist.
Hyperion
1yr ago
You need complex math to describe Solomoff Induction. But it isn't some ineffable mystery. Same with Quantum mechanics. A mindless piece of silicon can compute the equations of quantum mechanics. The brightest theologians can't agree on what absolute divine simplicity even is.
Hyperion
1yr ago
Sure, let's all worship the true prophet Zoroaster. It was the Orthodox Christians who took this to far.
Hell, even before(and after) Zoroaster, who the Judeans and then Christians stole so much of their theology and cosmology, various pagan and animistic faiths allowed for a world constructed by fickle gods and spirits, not much different from men, except in form and grandeur.
Hyperion
1yr ago
It doesn't confirm materialism and rationalism are correct, only that the fact the Creator is omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent. He can be two, but not all three. If you want to be a Spinozan and just call the materialistic universe God, be my guest. It's a hypothesis that predicts nothing and everything.
Hyperion
1yr ago
Because even small deviations of the official inflation or growth rates would become obvious over the long run, considering they are exponential. They would also show up in things like the exchange rate and interest rates. People who doubt the official statistics never sanity check themselves and consider what the world would look like if their skepticism was correct.
Hyperion
1yr ago
It is almost unimaginable that Russian will be allowed in any state capacity should Ukraine ever retake Crimea.
so were the Indians in North America
What master in his right mind wishes to kill off his slaves?
Canada, famously, had programs designed to assimilate Indian youths into the dominate culture. Countries throughout the world like France, Germany and Sweden had programs designed to force a certain dialect on the people usually through the schooling system. This kind of thing was considered normal and progressive back then. This was also true in the USA with the once thriving Italian and German speaking communities dying out once it was deemed unpatriotic during the World Wars. I don't find my Grandmother's family giving up their Junker last name any great tragedy.
I don't find the Ukrainians, empirically, anymore bloodthirsty than the Russians in this war. Nor the Jews anymore bloodthirsty than the Arabs that have always wanted to extirpate the Jews by any means necessary.
Hyperion
1yr ago
Yet, Tajiks in Uzbekistan feel themselves totally welcome in a nation made up by the Russians (Uzbeks aren't themselves even Uzbeks). Countless minorities feel welcome in America from Sicilians, to Lebanese, to Irish, and so on. Why not blacks?
Hyperion
1yr ago
Le Guin has this problem, in general , as also shown in A Wizard of Earthsea. Where, in every badly made adaptation the protagonist is made white instead of the intended black. I also imagined the protagonist white when I read them as a child.
Her problem is she is to good of a writer to make truly progressive works. "Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto."
Hyperion
1yr ago
He could have, by your own account, avoided the prison sentence entirely by coughing up the money. It isn't a miscarriage of justice that a man decides he'd rather spend 14 years in jail then cough up the cash for his ex-wife. It says more about his own issues then it does the justice system.
Hyperion
1yr ago
Hamas is the no negotiation political party in Palestine. They are very explicit about that. It's leaders are happy to siphon off billions and live the good life in Qatar and the rank and file soldiers are so ideologically captured they don't know anything except killing Jews and political dissidents.
There's lots of parallels, from confinement to reservations, to raids on civilians and mutilation of their corpses, to more moderate forces being slowly eliminated by both sides, to the inherent tactics of guerilla and small independent parties leading coordinated raids using low tech means of insertion and communication. Even the ideological component and propaganda is somewhat similar.
The raids on civilians, mutilation of corpses, guerilla tactics and small independent parties leading coordinated raids are just regular plains Indian tactics that date back to tactics used by the original steppe people over 5000 years ago. These aren't unique to their conflicts with settled peoples. They used these same tactics against each other. The only thing unique is that the settled people had the power to force them onto reservations instead of just scattering them or forcing them into a tributary relationship, like the Chinese, Persians and Romans regularly did in Eurasia.
One thing that's confusing me here is his statement [slightly trimmed] "the Jewish groups splitting off and going to Europe and North Africa, etc, are the only ones who didnt convert to either Islam or Christianity". Were there no jews who never left the area but also never converted to christianity or islam? Did they just not exist, or are they just missing from these genetic samples (perhaps they so completely mixed with immigrant jews that they're no longer a distinguishable population?), or am I just blind?
The various Jewish Diaspora groups mostly died out or were/are very tiny. Modern Jews are mostly descended from European Jews even after the Holocaust. These European Jews are descended from a very small group that migrated from the Levant into Europe shortly after Muslims took over the Levant.
https://www.razibkhan.com/p/ashkenazi-jewish-genetics-a-match
Hyperion
1yr ago
People make too much hay of the colonial qualifier, but there is a significant parallel between the native american lost cause and this one. And it translates into similar tactics. For both sides.
?
As far as I'm aware Native resistance took the form typical of tribal warfare. It wasn't anything special except for the fact that they eventually found themselves completely outmatched in a way they hadn't when fighting comparable Indian tribes.
Hyperion
1yr ago
In theory they could just let the exchange rate vary, but in practice they don't. That was my point. It's no coincidence inflation fell world wide after 1982 when it fell in the USA. Just like there was worldwide deflation in 2008 when there was deflation in the USA.
Hyperion
1yr ago
Exchange rates always vary alot for various reasons. The question is if they follow changes in USA monetary policy. And they do. It's easy to see in the graph.
Hyperion
1yr ago
Even Thatcher, elected on an inflation-fighting platform in 1979 and subsequently said by many to have brought inflation down too rapidly, only brought inflation down to about 5% by late 1982, which was exactly the figure that Labour promised in their 1979 manifesto:
That is more that the UK followed USA monetary policy. Even after the fixed exchange rate system that was Bretton Woods ended, countries still didn't want their exchange rates to the dollar to change very much. It was the tightening by the Federal Reserve that forced the Bank of England's hand.
Hyperion
1yr ago
They; at least, appear to work hard. I'm not sure how much value they produce; but, they try to look like they are producing value. They spend the effort on the appearance of the thing. I won't debate the actual product, because how could anyone without info into the goings on of the business make any real verdict except the one given by the stock price.
Hyperion
1yr ago
horror at this alien thing we call modern business.
That's not really modern business. Merchants and noblemen running estates always did stuff like this. Caesar was perennially in debt and a lot of what he did was an attempt to climb out of that debt. All's well if it ends well is an expression for a reason and we have courts, because it often doesn't end well. The only other option is a totalitarian surveillance state and regulatory apparatus with commissars in every business (and you better hope those commissars aren't corrupt and lawsuits aren't filed anyway).
And what are those of us billions who number the people who are not the sons of Judah? What does the law of this universal and great god say of us?
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