LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
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User ID: 657
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
7d 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
3mo 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
3mo 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
5mo 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
8mo ago
What's your point?
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
8mo 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
9mo 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
9mo 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
9mo 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
9mo 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
10mo 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.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
11mo ago
To talk about the plagarism allegation specifically:
Such an allegation is a bit rich when Hbomberguy is close friends with Hasan Piker, is who is the king of freebooting and stealing content. But I guess it's okay because in the video Hbomberguy makes one, tiny joke about Hasan where he doesn't even mention him by name and he got permission from Hasan to make the joke beforehand. So I guess that's fair and Hbomberguy is principled in criticising everyone, right.
The whole of "BreadTube" rife with plagarism and stealing content - it's just selective outrage against IH because he's an ideological enemy. At the very least, IH did cite the article and substantially valued added even if he could have done more.
The whole of Easter involves the passion of Christ, His crucifixion, His redemption of mankind's sin, and His death, ressurection and eventual assumption. It's literally the point of Christianity, and the core holy-day. In this case I would just say the American Christians who think Christmas is more important than Easter from a Christian point of view are just wrong and have been unduly influenced by the secular popularity of Christmas.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
11mo ago
Easter is the most important Christian holiday. The secular perception that Christmas is more important than Easter is an artifact of secular society widely celebrating (a secular and commericalised version of) Christmas.
A mildly interesting competing hypothesis in itself compared to "smartphones and instagram wreck teen girls' psyches".
Why is this a competing hypothesis? I would imagine they're interrelated. It seems obvious to me that conservative parents would have greater restrictions on, or at least greater oversight of their children's social media usage and technology use. And the other way, it is likely a child who hasn't been 'influenced' by social media drivel is more responsive to conservative parenting and a better relationship with (conservative) parents.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
11mo ago
(Perhaps I'm being rather rose-tinted about journalistic standards in the past and this is all one big "always has been" meme.)
This video essay makes a pretty compelling argument that, yes, in fact the news was (more) unbiased and higher quality in the past and it's not just nostalgia.
Some of the examples are mindblowing. The example of the reporting on the Soviet Union's political affairs is remarkably unbiased and uneditorialised despite it being the literal height of the Cold War.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
11mo ago
If you just take the Pauline letters as the orthodoxy in the early Church, which it was and still is, there's virtually nothing disagreeable (modern progressivism notwithstanding)
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.
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