FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
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User ID: 1739
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
3mo ago
I would object to describing the situation as “Christian gangsters going after Christian community leaders”. I don’t think anyone can rightfully complain “No True Scotsman” if I say that the vicious killers of the cartels, who murder pastors because they help addicts recover, are not Christian.
If you think their standards are too loose, fine, but is there any doubt that millions of Christian’s are currently being persecuted? If not in Mexico or Columbia than certainly in China, North Korea, India, Malaysia, Pakistan, and other countries that enforce laws against Christian religious practice.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
4mo ago
Kind of seems like they're trying to change the conditions. That 9 step plan they started off with in 2007 consisted of:
(i) research on the prevalence, risk, and protective factors for suicidal behaviors; (ii) increased public awareness; (iii) human resources for early intervention; (iv) community efforts for mental health; (v) better access to mental healthcare; (vi) supportive community environments; (vii) prevention of suicide reattempts; (viii) support for persons bereaved by suicide; and (ix) enhanced public–private partnerships.
Seems like doing more to treat depression, improving access to mental healthcare, and creating supportive community environments are all ways of changing the conditions. What would you want them to do?
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
6mo ago
While I agree with you about China and the dangers of a lopsided population pyramid, it's also true that we really don't want 8 billion people on a planet with limited temperate zones.
Why not? Even now Earth has plenty of habitable land. We’re nowhere near the carrying capacity of the planet. So what’s wrong with 8 billion people?
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
10mo ago
Cui bono? Who would benefit from orchestrating two assassinations in this case? I’m inclined to believe it’s coincidence without that.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
2d ago
As someone who came from a Protestant backwater (evangelical non-denominational, essentially) I can attest to that! We didn't have Acquinas or Augustine or Calvin (and we didn't want them either!) but we had Lewis. We adored Lewis!
Why here's a potentially appropriate bit of Lewis now, on how non-Christians often view the idea of sin:
Apart from this linguistic difficulty, the greatest barrier I have met is the almost total absence from the minds of my audience of any sense of sin. This has struck me more forcibly when I spoke to the R.A.F. than when I spoke to students: whether (as I believe) the proletariat is more self-righteous than other classes, or whether educated people are cleverer at concealing their pride, this creates for us a new situation. The early Christian preachers could assume in their hearers, whether Jews, Metuentes, or Pagans, a sense of guilt. (That this was common among Pagans is shown by the fact that both Epicureanism and the mystery religions both claimed, though in different ways, to assuage it.) Thus the Christian message was in those days unmistakably the Evangelium, the Good News. It promised healing to those who knew they were sick. We have to convince our hearers of the unwelcome diagnosis before we can expect them to welcome the news of the remedy.
The ancient man approached God (or even the gods) as the accused person approaches his judge. For the modern man the roles are reversed. He is the judge: God is in the dock. He is quite a kindly judge: if God should have a reasonable defense for being the god who permits war, poverty, and disease, he is ready to listen to it. The trial may even end in God's acquittal. But the important thing is that man is on the bench and God in the dock.
It is generally useless to try to combat this attitude, as older preachers did, by dwelling on sins like drunkenness and un-chastity. The modern proletariat is not drunken. As for fornication, contraceptives have made a profound difference. As long as this sin might socially ruin a girl by making her the mother of a bastard, most men recognized the sin against charity which it involved, and their consciences were often troubled by it. Now that it need have no such consequences, it is not, I think, generally felt to be a sin at all. My own experience suggests that if we can awake the conscience of our hearers at all, we must do so in quite different directions. We must talk of Conceit, spite, jealousy, cowardice, meanness, etc. But I am very far from believing that I have found the solution of this problem.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
1mo ago
It will be easier for them to salvage what they have if congress makes a strong statement that it intends to keep government working as it had been regardless of presidential caprice.
And they’ll do this by shutting down the government?
The main argument from the Democrat point of view against shutting down the government is that it will make it easier for Trump to dismantle it. In a shutdown he can pick and choose which agencies to furlough and which to keep open, he could wipe out whole departments for the duration of the shutdown. If you believe Trump is trying to dismantle the government and you think that’s a bad thing, why would you make it easier for him to do it?
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
2mo ago
So you're implying that these stable societies (stable for whom, exactly -- the precariat? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precariat) aren't comprised of a majority of people who experience incessant instability and poverty?
Yes, that is clearly the case. I’m not sure how you could think otherwise, the vast majority of people on planet Earth are not living in poverty. That’s even more so the case for developed countries. Do you have evidence to the contrary?
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
2mo ago
No. This implies that everyone has evidence for miracles, and only by faith can they be denied. This is just plain false. Likewise, many who believe in miracles have only books to go on.
Chesterton argues (quite rightly) that everyone does have evidence for miracles: the evidence of testimony. People have been writing about miracles and testifying to having witnessed miracles since as far back in history as we have records for. People report the supernatural and miraculous all the time. Chesterton's point is that theists can take each miracle claim and accept it based on the evidence: is this person a reliable reporter, how likely are there to be natural explanations, how probable is it that it was a trick, etc. But the atheist must begin by dismissing the possibility that the miracle could have happened at all, because the atheist is committed to the "doctrine" that miracles do not happen. Even if the evidence was very strong that a miracle occurred, the atheist would alternative explanations to be more probable from the get go, since he "knows" that miracles do not happen.
Here's the full quote, which captures the nuances a bit better:
Any one who likes, therefore, may call my belief in God merely mystical; the phrase is not worth fighting about. But my belief that miracles have happened in human history is not a mystical belief at all; I believe in them upon human evidences as I do in the discovery of America. Upon this point there is a simple logical fact that only requires to be stated and cleared up. Somehow or other an extraordinary idea has arisen that the disbelievers in miracles consider them coldly and fairly, while believers in miracles accept them only in connection with some dogma. The fact is quite the other way. The believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they have evidence for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them (rightly or wrongly) because they have a doctrine against them. The open, obvious, democratic thing is to believe an old apple-woman when she bears testimony to a miracle, just as you believe an old apple-woman when she bears testimony to a murder. The plain, popular course is to trust the peasant's word about the ghost exactly as far as you trust the peasant's word about the landlord. Being a peasant he will probably have a great deal of healthy agnosticism about both. Still you could fill the British Museum with evidence uttered by the peasant, and given in favour of the ghost. If it comes to human testimony there is a choking cataract of human testimony in favour of the supernatural. If you reject it, you can only mean one of two things. You reject the peasant's story about the ghost either because the man is a peasant or because the story is a ghost story. That is, you either deny the main principle of democracy, or you affirm the main principle of materialism— the abstract impossibility of miracle. You have a perfect right to do so; but in that case you are the dogmatist. It is we Christians who accept all actual evidence—it is you rationalists who refuse actual evidence being constrained to do so by your creed. But I am not constrained by any creed in the matter, and looking impartially into certain miracles of mediaeval and modern times, I have come to the conclusion that they occurred. All argument against these plain facts is always argument in a circle. If I say, "Mediaeval documents attest certain miracles as much as they attest certain battles," they answer, "But mediaevals were superstitious"; if I want to know in what they were superstitious, the only ultimate answer is that they believed in the miracles. If I say "a peasant saw a ghost," I am told, "But peasants are so credulous." If I ask, "Why credulous?" the only answer is—that they see ghosts. Iceland is impossible because only stupid sailors have seen it; and the sailors are only stupid because they say they have seen Iceland. It is only fair to add that there is another argument that the unbeliever may rationally use against miracles, though he himself generally forgets to use it.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
4mo ago
You know how every time there's a new potential pandemic you hear about how new diseases are deadlier because the pathogen is not adapted to human hosts? And how a well adapted pathogen doesn't want to kill the host, it wants to live in the host long enough to propagate to other hosts?
TB is arguably the most human adapted pathogen out there. It has our immune system beat six ways from Sunday, kills slowly over an extended period of time, and can lie dormant for years before becoming active again (which means healthy people you let through customs may have a passive infection, and will only turn active and contagious later when they're already in the country). It is also arguably the most difficult bacterial infection to cure. You need to be on multiple powerful medications with significant side effects (including potential blindness) for 6-9 months in order to cure it.
If a TB strain managed to become resistant to one of those medications then it may not be possible to cure it, not without new drug development. In the US we've managed to mostly extirpate the disease at great cost over many years of effort. If an antibiotic resistant strain showed up it could undo decades of progress in US health.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
4mo ago
What do you mean when you say “sadistic”? The textbook definition would be something like “sexual gratification gained from inflicting pain to others”. Do you mean that the desire for justice, which seems to be a human universal (even monkeys seem to desire justice) is often a source of sexual gratification? I doubt that’s what you meant, since that clearly isn’t the case. I suspect that by “sadistic” you meant “evil”, and that you believe desiring justice is usually an evil desire. I would disagree strongly with that. Or perhaps you only meant that people often are pleased when justice is served; yet, why shouldn’t they be?
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
4mo ago
I was not as clever as you and simply took the probability of surviving each year from ages 78-81 and multiplied them. That gave me a combined probability of survival to age 82 of 77.58%.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
5mo ago
A single train line, if it has been fully upgraded with appropriate sidings and signals, can move 1,000,000 tons per day when working optimally. There are currently only two major rail lines from Russia to China. So you would need to build at least a third and have all three running optimally to get all the iron ore China needs overland.
But that’s just the iron! China also imports 14 million barrels of oil each day. The maximum cargo train capacity for oil is 90,000 barrels per day, so that’s another 155 trains per day. And we haven’t even discussed the amount of grain, copper, and other raw materials we need to import daily. We’re going to need to build at least two more train lines, probably three, and run them at optimal efficiency.
Except wait: we can’t run them at optimal efficiency because Russia and China use different track gauges! That means all the cargo needs to be unloaded and reloaded at the Chinese border.
Is it possible to build the rail infrastructure needed to get all of Chinas imports overland? Possible, yes, but very impractical. Especially when you consider that the Chinese will need to rely on the Russians to run their trains efficiently.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
5mo ago
Even if China gets domestic consumption off the ground they're still reliant on imports for raw materials. China imports more than than 3 times as much oil is it produces, imports a little under three times as much iron ore as it produces, a little under 3 times as much copper ore as it produces, and produces less than 65% of their food domestically. They need global trade to keep their industry running and their people fed. You're not going to ship the 14 million barrels of oil, 3 million tons of iron ore, and the 161,000 tons of grain that China imports daily by train.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
5mo ago
India likes us and hates China and in a conventional war scenario we will be putting pressure on them to cut off any trade into China. Ukraine doesn’t have anywhere close to the power to do that. You can’t compare what happens to trade when a minor power with no allies is in a war to what would happen to trade when the world hegemon goes to war.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
5mo ago
You can just do things.
That realization was the most striking aspect of Trump’s first term. It hit me when he moved the embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. Bush had talked about doing it for years but somehow it never happened, just like he somehow never got us Supreme Court Justices that would overturn Roe, or a hundred other things. Then Trump comes along and just does it. It could have been done all along. You can just do things.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
1mo ago
Olive beat me to it! Here's the full quote, from a letter Lewis wrote to a friend in 1939:
What did you think of Snowwhite and the VII Dwarfs? I saw it at Malvern last week. . . . Leaving out the tiresome question of whether it is suitable for children (which I don’t know and don’t care) I thought it almost inconceivably good and bad—I mean, I didn’t know one human being could be so good and bad. The worst thing of all was the vulgarity of the winking dove at the beginning, and the next worst the faces of the dwarfs. Dwarfs ought to be ugly of course, but not in that way. And the dwarfs’ jazz party was pretty bad. I suppose it never occurred to the poor boob that you could give them any other kind of music. But all the terrifying bits were good, and the animals really most moving: and the use of shadows (of dwarfs and vultures) was real genius. What might not have come of it if this man had been educated—or even brought up in a decent society?
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
1mo ago
Edit: Just a few days ago, Matt Walsh reposted a crypto-Swastika on X (if you don't see it at first, try squinting). I believe he knew what he was doing.
I doubt it. It's not at all easy to notice unless someone tells you it's there, and the guy Wash is replying to (the one who posted the picture, I assume) is making a leftist argument, which Matt is rebutting. There's no tongue in cheek winking or anything like that.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
2mo ago
The surface is still going to be hit pretty hard with radiation if you don’t have a magnetosphere, atmosphere or no.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
2mo ago
Is this the world you want to live in? Is this the world you want your loved ones and great- and great-great offspring to live in? Is this or something resembling it as good as you want it to get?
Unequivocally yes. In 1990 37.8% of the planet lived in extreme poverty. Now less than 9% do. From 1920-1970 about 110 million people died from famine. From 1970-2020 only 10 million did. In 1900 average global life expectancy was 32 years. Today it’s 71. Historically, 50% of kids died before the age of 15. In 1950 that was down to 25%. In 2020 it was 4%.
We’ve built a pretty great world, and it keeps getting better every decade. I sincerely doubt we could do much better.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
2mo ago
"I believe that in the huge mass of mythology which has come down to us a good many different sources are mixed—true history, allegory, ritual, the human delight in storytelling, etc. But among these sources I include the supernatural, both diabolical and divine. We need here concern ourselves only with the latter. If my religion is erroneous, then occurrences of similar motifs in pagan stories are, of course, instances of the same, or a similar error. But if my religion is true, then these stories may well be a preparatio evangelica, a divine hinting in poetic and ritual form at the same central truth which was later focused and (so to speak) historicized in the Incarnation. To me, who first approached Christianity from a delighted interest in, and reverence for, the best pagan imagination, who loved Balder before Christ and Plato before St. Augustine, the anthropological argument against Christianity has never been formidable. On the contrary, I could not believe Christianity if I were forced to say that there were a thousand religions in the world of which 999 were pure nonsense and the thousandth (fortunately) true. My conversion, very largely, depended on recognizing Christianity as the completion, the actualization, the entelechy, of something that had never been wholly absent from the mind of man. " C. S. Lewis, "Religion Without Dogma?"
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
2mo ago
It’s pretty crazy to firebomb Shapiro’s house over it, since he has pretty much 0 impact on US foreign policy. But he is a Jew, so…
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
2mo ago
Similarly, a car is in fact just a simplified animal that's made out of steel.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
2mo ago
You are right to feel underwhelmed, because Lewis wasn't so much putting forward an argument in favor of Christianity there but responding to one of the current significant arguments against Christianity of his day: that because Christianity is similar to other myths, it must not be true. As Lewis wrote,
If you start by knowing on other grounds that Christianity is false, then the pagan stories may be another nail in its coffin: just as if you started by knowing that there were no such things as crocodiles, then the various stories about dragons might help to confirm your disbelief. But if the truth or falsehood of Christianity is the very question you are discussing, then the argument from anthropology is surely a petitio*
In other words, yes, "people tend to tell the same kind of stories" is a perfectly reasonable explanation of the phenomenon. But its not a good positive argument against Christianity being true, which is what atheists were claiming at the time.
*Meaning, begging the question.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
3mo ago
Last I checked, Daily Wire was doing a victory lap after Trump's election. This doesn't seem like the result of Boreing screwing up, he's always been more interested in making movies.
Though their DailyWire+ subscriber counts are not public, they have announced numbers from time to time. They said they had 1,000,000 subscribers in 2022. According to Axios last year they had over $200 million in revenue, and in 2023 they had a capital valuation of over $1 billion (https://www.axios.com/2024/12/10/the-daily-wire-eyes-growth-investment-in-2025).
I don't see any signs of Daily Wire declining, in a business sense. They seem to be headed up and to the right.
It’s not about expense it’s about throughout. A modern cargo train can carry about 13,000 tons of material. China imports 3 million tons of iron ore per day.
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