LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
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User ID: 657
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
10d ago
There was a short thread discussing this issue while ago.
The short version is that Christians are obligated to act with charity and love to all people. However, that does not mean Christians shouldn't condemn the sins people have committed and treat them out harshly out of love (love is willing the good of the other - the good of the other may require some 'tough love'). This includes accepting there may be temporal consequences for sin (penance is built around this concept, but also consequences outside of penance). Additionally, there is a significant degree of prudential judgement Christians should excerise when it comes to determining genuine conversion or not. After all, Jesus warns against 'wolves in sheep's clothing' and false prophets more than once. False prophets easily extends to those who claim to have had an encounter with Christ (i.e. a conversion).
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
16d ago
How timely - Sargon/Carl Benjamin just released a video Lindsay and everything described above. I haven't watched it yet it but Sargon, unsurprisingly, seems critical of Lindsay.
I am reasonably sympathetic to Sargon. He's been somewhat cringe and said some stupid things in the past (especially when he ran as a candidate for UKIP a while ago), but it's clear his views have evolved and matured significantly from what they were even a few years ago, let alone from the GamerGate era which kickstarted his e-fame.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
20d ago
Could this not be explained by women with high education marrying men with high or even higher education (i.e. wealthy men), which has a positive effect on fertility. Confounder?
The answer to virtually every "why is X industry/sector/institution woke?" is the same: It's the colleges and universities.
Every institution that wants or needs college graduates are getting people filling their ranks who have been subjected to four years of woke propaganda. I would call it entryism, which it kind of is, except it doesn't take much to subvert an insitution when the overwhelming majority of your generational cohort already believes what you do. Every insitution that is not explicitly right-wing/conservative/anti-woke and requires college graduates is subjected to this. Turns out, a lot of insitutions meet this definition, including most of the important ones.
Even if the game developers themselves are mildy resistant to woke ideology on account of their nerdiness (a fact I am not convinced of, but for the sake of the argument), the HR, Payroll, Executive Support etc teams are all full of woke graduates.
I've said it before, but I probably should say it more. If you want to stop 'wokeness', you have to target the academy first and foremost. Otherwise, we are just going to keep reaching "peak wokeness" every year.
I remember a decade and more ago people - back when the woke were called "SJWs", people would just brush them off as silly college kids, it's just a college thing that won't affect the 'real' world. Turns out, those college graduates actually had to go somewhere after college.
What exactly do you charge them with? To be clear, while Gaetz threw the word "extortion" around, there is no extortion in this case. Extortion is when someone threatens to inflict harm unless they are paid.
I believe what OP is alleging/implying is that Greenberg may have made a false allegation against Gaetz in order to save his own skin (offer to point the finger at a juicy target of a Congressman to lessen his own sentence). The implication is that tbe FBI knows that this is a weak or bogus allegation, but proceed with the investigation anyway, or at least conclude as a result of the investigation that it is bogus.
McGee, who is contected to both the Federal Prosecutor's Office and the CIA, attempts to use this knowledge to blackmail the senior Gaetz (through Alford) to get money to rescue Levinson in exchange for using his connections to get the case dropped against the junior Gaetz.
I think most people would agree that "we will drop a bogus/weak case against you in exchange for money" amounts to extortion. Rephrased, it can be "give me money and I'll won't charge you". Even with a legitimate crime being prosecuted it can still amount to extortion, as it's clearly an attempt to violate the defendant's due process rights.
Especially in the case of a high profile figure like a Congressman, there doesn't even have to be a a charge or conviction, the mere reporting that a Congressman js being investigated can be extremely damaging, which is what happened here.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
1mo ago
This is a genocide, as leading expert scholars and institutions have been saying for months.
I really hate these weasel words, you see this all the time. It's also true to say "this isn't a genocide, as leading expert scholars and institutions have been saying for month." Because clearly there is strongly differing opinions on this controversial major international conflict. But I suppose "this is or isn't a genocide depending on which experts you ask to support your politicial position" isn't particularly useful to the purpose of the letter.
And I say this as somone who is probably more favourable to the Palestinians than most people here.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
1mo ago
she was ponderously slow to realize Assad was an asshole, and remained skeptical that he used chemical weapons after.
Assad is an asshole, but my understanding is that the evidence he used chemical weapons is actually quite weak and possibly false intelligence. And it's not like the US and her allies and the international community more broadly have never lied about Middle Eastern dictatorships doing bad things for propaganda.
But it has been a long while since I've looked into this all.
Seperation of church and state was never about protecting the state from religion, but protecting religion from the state. The former is a contemporary reimagining of the meaning of the seperation to suit political ends. Similarly, it was freedom of religion, not freedom from religion as has entered the popular lexicon.
As if the state ever needs protecting in this manner! Even if the state (or the people managing the state) does implicitly profess a religion, even a secular one, the principle of seperation of church and state means that the state couldn't impose its views on the genuine and legitimate free expression of religion on the people. Which is arguably is exactly what's happening in this situation.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
2mo ago
From memory, Russia never put in a formal application to NATO, but it wasn't just a sarcastic quip. You could probably debate the sincerity of the interest of Russia joining NATO, but it definitely wasn't an prima facie sarcastic suggestion.
You have to remember the geopolitical context at the time. Russia was a newly "liberal" country after the collapse of the Soviet Union only a decade ago, and while significant tension did still exist between USA and Russia (particularly relating to NATO's involvement in the Yugoslav Wars), relations between the two was much more optimistic that is now or has been recently.
9/11 presented a reasonable opportunity for a genuine, renewed, positive relationship between Russia and USA. One thing that Russia and the US have in common (even to this day) is dealing with Islamism/Islamic terrorism, a threat to both nations. Russia had been, and has been, constantly dealing with Islamic terrorism within its own borders long before 9/11, and could reasonable see opportunity for US cooperation and support post 9/11 (it actually did happen to a limited extent under much worse circumstances dealing with ISIS).
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
2mo ago
As some of the other comments have already pointed out, it's not man's place to determine whether someone has truly converted and repented, it's God's.
In the Gospels, there are two parables (that I can recall of the top of my head) that deal with this issue - The Parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32), which is relatively well known even to non-Christians, but also the perhaps lesser known the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard (Matthew 20) where, abridging siginificantly, the workers who were recruited later and did less work on the vineyard were paid the same who were recruited earlier.
Regardless, there certainly should be a degree of prudential judgement and healthy dose of scepticism about a convert like the one you are describing. That is, someone who seems to be converting merely because it is convenient and beneficial for themselves and not a genuine conversion. That doesn't mean they shouldn't be welcomed by the community broadly, but that they're not necessarily going to get 'benefit' of finding a tradional spouse.
The Catholic perspective on this (I don't have time to go find the supporting sections in the Catechism/other sources) is that God will forgive you of your spiritual sin, but that doesn't mean you're immune from the temporal consequences of your sin. This is fairly obvious when talking about a sin like murder. You still have to serve your prison sentence (and Catholics would broadly support that even if you repented), and when you are released and try to integrate back into society people would rightfully be wary of you even if you became a Christian.
Similarly, a formally promiscuous man or woman may struggle to find an always traditional, virginal woman or man to marry. That's just a temporal consequence of their sin. Maybe if they are sincere then someone may accept them and marry them regardless (perhaps even someone who was in a similar situation!). But quite possibly not. In some sense, it may effectively be penance for their sin. They're not guaranteed marriage, it may not be their vocation.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
4mo ago
I can kind of see the logic up until the point of porn, where still falls apart because the neckbeard men portrayed in the ad are the most stereotypical, prototypical consumer of porn. They're exactly the kind of men portrayed or people imagine as going into adult video stores in the 80s. Even if all the other points were true, in no way could you convince me that those men are the kind of men who want to ban porn, which the ad implies.
But I suppose they just have paper over that because as makers of the ad are 'sex-positive' as you say (which includes porn) that just have to pretend like these guys wouldn't be consuming porn.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
4mo ago
I agree, the messaging just seems so bizarre and dissonant.
Normally the fat, sweat, ungroomed neckbeard stereotype is meant to be obsessed with porn, but instead the message in this ad is that they hate porn? That normal, upstanding citizens like sexual deviancy and that the neckbeard losers are actually the prudes? It's just so topsy-turvy that it's actually hard to wrap my brain around it for how counter-intuitive the messaging is.
Will it work on voters? Who knows, despite how counter-intuitive it is. Not even 100% who the target of this ad is mean to be.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
6mo ago
Google was able to lose $2 billion a year on YouTube for over a decade. Additionally Google tweaks search results to favour YT over other platforms. Also it's integrated with Google's ad sales so any competitor needs to come up with an entire ad tech stack to compete.
I would assume those two things are connected. People always point YouTube being run at a loss as a reason why no competitor will appear. But I wouldn't be suprised if it was the case that YouTube is effectively just a loss leader for Google (I mean "Alphabet"). YouTube is such an incredibly effective data harvesting tool that would improve the value dramatically of Google's other services and products.
YouTube also likely has huge administrative bloat, as the Twitter firings demonstrated was the case for Twitter.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
9mo ago
What's your point?
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
9mo ago
On the one hand, the US public appears to be overwhelmingly favoring Israel over Hamas (>80%), but I am not sure if this means as much as Israel's supporters claim. I've seen many pro-Palestinians and anti-Zionists denounce Hamas for other reasons and I got the sense that not all of them were for sake of optics.
It really fustrates me to no end how many pro-Israel hawks present a false dichotomy between Israel and Hamas, and imply Palestine is necessarily synonymous with Hamas. It doesn't even make sense as a direct comparison - it really should be Israel and Palestine. It's incredibly disingenuous.
Apparently, the Israel-Palestine conflict only began in 2005 with the creation of Hamas. It was all peaceful before that.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
10mo ago
Do you mind elaborating on your position? Are you arguing that the 19th century fertility transition being due to men basically just pulling out more ("men's pull out game was stronger")? Assuming for the sake of the argument this is true, why did this occur?
Isn't the social effects of industrialisation in the 19th century a more reason explanation (including mass urbanisation)?
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
10mo ago
Probably because the US has a need for Israel in the Middle East as basically the best army in the region. Perhaps not 100% capable of paying for their own bombs but extremely capable at using those bombs to modern military standards.
This seems like a bit of circular reasoning. The US support Israel because it has the best army in the region. Why does US need to support Israel? Because the Arabs (generally) hate the US and the US need geopolitical support in the region. Why do the Arabs hate the US? Because the US supports Israel.
Additionally, the US actually gets very little from Israel. Israel fragrantly acts against US interests and ignores US calls all the time. Even the most milquetoast request from the US to Israel to maybe tone it down just a bit is just blatantly ignored. Israel demands the US intervene on its behalf all the time but rarely reciprocates. Prior to post-WW2, the Americans were actually seen very favorably by the Arabs.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
10mo ago
Bit of a false equivalence, because Danzig and Istanbul were specifically made international cities as a punitive post-war measure against Germany and Turkey respectively. A better analogy would be the various international and concession cities of the 19th century, which were generally pretty successful until the wave of anti-colonialism in the 20th century made them politically unpalatable. But even this is an imperfect analogy.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
11mo ago
Part of me wonders how much more stable the Middle East would have been if the UN had made Jerusalem an international zone/international city like was proposed back in 1947. The proposal had overwhelming support from the international community at the time.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
11mo ago
Corrected, thanks.
Those people work with a very loose definition of genocide.
Personally, I'm not particularly interested in the question of whether Israel's actions meet the 'definition' of genocide, formal or otherwise. I get why it is important (least of all for the ICC and other international law proceedings) but at some level it just becomes a semantic question. I do think those who claim Russia is committing genocide against Ukraine but refuse to make or support the claim that that Israel is committing genocide against Palestine have a huge double standard.
My perspective is that, at best, Israel has displayed a overwhelming level of disregard and negligence to the Palestinian people that amounts to criminality, both recently and historically. At worst, I have to take at face value the multiple statements, both recently and historically, of senior Israeli officials that they want to utterly destroy Gaza and/or the Palestinian people. I both these things to be horribily immoral and should be rebuked. Whether they meet the formal definition of genocide I don't particularly care to argue.
Civilian casualty figures for the invasion of Gaza are on par with other urban assaults by western militaries. You can contrast this with the battles in the Ukraine war, which are a lot a lot worse, and Assad’s reconquests of major Syrian cities, which are also way way worse.
This is not true. The civilian casualities in Gaza are significantly higher than that in Ukraine, the invasion of which by Russia people have been rushing to call genocide, including many people here. For simplicity I will just takes about deaths specifically and not casualities.
As already posted below the OHCHR estimates 9,701 civilian deaths in Ukraine between 24 Feb 2022 and 24 September 2023.
Reliable estimates for Gaza are hard to find but OHCHR estimates the deaths to be over 11,000 between 7 October 2023 and 16 November 2023 (some of whom would not strictly speaking be Gazans as there are also casualities outside of Gaza). So Gaza has roughly the same number of deaths in a month than Ukraine had in a year and a half. More recent numbers from early January suggest this number could be over 22,000 for Gaza. This would put the percentage of Gazans killed somewhere around 1% of the total population.
Now, Gaza is more densely populated and urbanised where the fighting is taking place, but this is also offset by the fact that Ukraine has a much larger population than Gaza and the operations are larger scale.
Regardless, no matter how you cut it, the civilian casualties in Gaza are extremely high and people would not be hesitating to call it genocide if it were any other country.
If, charitably and by the literal wording, the point of the Pope's document is to say 'you can bless the individual(s) in a same-sex union, but you are not blessing the union itself', this isn't really anything new and is at best just a clarification on existing practices.
But if this is supposedly not a new postition then why even make such a clarification, when in practice everyone knows it is going to lead to more confusion and misrepresentation. Unless the point is to deliberately introduce ambiguity under the guise of clarification, of course.
Regardless, if living in a same-sex union is a mortal sin, then priests shouldn't be blessing individuals actively, knowingly, publicly and persistently living in mortal sin anyway.
In those days there was no king in Israel; all the people did what was right in their own eyes.
Judges 21:25
The final verse of the book of Judges, the majority of Judges describing the people of Israel committing horrible atrocities.
China's One Child Policy is the worst, most destructive government (social) policy in history and clearly shows the danger of Malthusian thought put into practice. The effects of the One Child Policy have been ruinous for China, not just for economic reasons (including dependency ratio), but for so may other reasons, including indirectly causing China's gender imbalance, decline of relationships and family, and the social malaise and stagnation that occurs when the elderly outnumber the youth, a highly unnatural and disordered state of affairs.
I strongly believe that despite all the both morally and economically awful things the CCP has done, it is the One Child Policy and the One Child Policy essentially alone that stopped the 'rise of China'. If it were not for the One Child Policy, China would be the clear number one superpower now, rather that floundering behind (despite all its own faults) the surprisingly resilient US. Or at the very least, China would still be ascendant rather than the rapid descent that is waiting for China around the corner.
While it's true that China would be experiencing some effects of the demographic transition today regardless of the One Child Policy, and that these problems are not unique to China, as in both the West and China's developed Asian neighbours, the One Child Policy accelerated China's demographic transition to such a degree that China's demographics are comparable to RoK, Japan and Taiwan, despite those countries having a 20-40 year head start on the demographic transition caused by economic development, depending on how you count it. China's current fertility rate (approx. 1.1) is worse than Japan's (approx. 1.2), similar to Taiwan, and slightly better than RoK (approx. 0.75). And this is without considering the reliability of China's numbers, given that the CCP has a tendency to "mistakenly" inflate their population numbers, the situation may well be much worse than is reported.
Unfortunately, despite all evidence pointing to Malthusian thought being completely and utterly wrong (as well as deeply immoral, in my judgement), it is still heavily influential in both academic and popular though, if bolstered by a pervasive anti-natalist, anti-humanist Zeitgeist. I know I might be preaching to the converted here, but the fertility/demographic crisis is the most significant civilisational crisis, and the mainstream political class and intelligentsia are only just beginning to grasp the enormous problem that we are facing. But I doubt they will face much success in addressing it, as any solution to the problem will necessarily require a repudiation of the modernist individualism which the global political class and intelligentsia currently exist in.
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