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.
8mo ago
The legitimacy is legitimately valuable! Even if the election was stolen from you, you gracefully accept defeat unless you have the receipts.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
1mo ago
It's peaked, in as much as they can't get any more liberal and have nowhere to go but down.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
20d ago
I will believe the report of the 7th Army over your no sources cited whatsoever.
My mistake, when I said 'gas chamber' I meant 'homicidal gas chamber'. The camp had a 'gas chamber' but it was never used to kill anyone.
The Counter Intelligence Corps Detachment of the Seventh Army disagrees. Page 33 of the report:
"The internees who were brought to Camp Dachau for the sole purpose of being executed were in the most cases Jews and Russians. They were brought into the compound, lined up near the gas chambers, and were screened in a similar manner as internees who came to Dachau for imprisonment. Then they were marched to a room and told to undress...There were 15 shower faucets suspended from the ceiling from which gas was then released. There was one large chamber, capacity of which was 200, and five smaller gas chambers, capacity of each being 50. It took approximately 10 minutes for the execution. From the gas chamber, the door led to the Krematory to which the bodies were removed by internees who were selected for the job. The dead bodies were then placed in 5 furnaces, two to three bodies at a time."
So we have, on the one side, an SS document (which you haven't produced, though I have been so kind as to produce my source for your to examine) that says that the camp had a gas chamber but that it was never used to kill anyone. On the other hand you have a US report claiming that it was used to kill people, with photographic evidence, and the fact that the gas chamber is still there and can be seen today, and was clearly designed to administer poison gas for the purpose of killing people. Do you have any evidence that the execution device was never used to execute people? Something that would cause me to doubt the fine men in uniform of the 7th Army?
Eyewitness evidence is waaaaaaaaaaay better than archeological evidence when it comes to history. Ask any historian what they would rather dig up: a clay tablet with a contemporary account of an event, or a bunch of pot shards. Better yet, ask them if they’d rather have an ancient Akkadian magically transported to the modern day to talk to, or to find a new pile of old foundations and grave goods from the same era. Eyewitness wins every time.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
20d ago
The Claim of "the holocaust" is that the Germans uniquely set out to kill every jew in Europe, did so on an industrialized scale and with an efficiency never seen before in human, history, and that it is in a category of horror beyond any other genocide to ever exist including the Great Leap forward, Hoomodor, the Killing Fields of Cambodia, and CERTAINLY worse than the Soviet mass killing and expulsion of the German Diaspora post 1945.
The claim of the holocaust is that the Germans acted in a systematic fashion to kill millions of non-combatants, primarily Jews, during WWII. It is certainly not the claim that this is the worst thing that any society has ever done. I believe the standard holocaust "narrative" completely, but I would consider the Great Leap Forward, Holodomor, Killing Fields, the soviet Great Purge, just about everything Japan did to China, the Great Terror of the French revolution, the War in the Vendee, and a great many other historical events equal in kind to the holocaust, with a few greater in degree.
And the testimony of Eisenhower, in his autobiographies and public speaking, and the testimony of the US Army investigations into the camps, and the testimony of thousands of survivors, all seems to point to the fact that Germany killed millions of non-combatants, mostly Jews, on purpose. Primarily through starvation or being shot, but they also definitely killed people in gas chambers as well.
They certainly do not portray the camps as workcamps for enemy aliens. Eisenhower portrays them as "horror camps" where Germans showed "brutality and ruthless disregard of every shred of decency" and whose residents experienced "conditions of indescribable horror". At no point does he blame the conditions in the camps or the starvation of the camp inmates as being the result of collapse, or a loss of life support function during the onslaught of war. Find me the quote where he refers to them as standard work camps, or puts the blame on a lack of supplies rather than the Nazi "bestiality".
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
20d ago
I disagree. While you have to take the potential biases or other points of unreliability into account when dealing with eyewitness testimony, they are still more reliable for a historian than most other forms of evidence. All evidence has to be interpreted properly, whether it's eyewitness testimony or a pile of bones in the desert. Bones, for instance, can tell us many useful things: some of the injuries this human may have undergone, and whether they had a chance to heal or not, carbon dating information on provenance, gender, level of bone health, etc. If the historical question you are trying to answer is "How did Richard III die" then access to his bones may be very helpful indeed. But if the question is "What wars did Richard III wage, and against who, and why?" then written accounts will tell you far more, and far more reliably, then digging up bones will.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
21d ago
Eyewitness accounts are about the most reliable sources of evidence you get when it comes to history. The more of them you have the better, since you can cross reference them. And there really seems to be too many eyewitness accounts to discount, particularly contemporaneous accounts. Like a letter President Truman sent Eisenhower in 1945 about the problem of finding housing for displaced civilians in Europe in which he writes "Apparently it is being taken for granted that all displaced persons, irrespective of their former persecution or the likelihood that their repatriation or resettlement will be delayed, must remain in camps--many of which are overcrowded and heavily guarded. Some of these camps are the very ones where these people were herded together, starved, tortured and made to witness the death of their fellow-inmates and friends and relatives" and quotes a report from another source (Earl Harrison, an American on the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees) who wrote "As matters now stand, we appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except that we do not exterminate them. They are in concentration camps in large numbers under our military guard instead of S.S. troops. One is led to wonder whether the German people, seeing this, are not supposing that we are following or at least condoning Nazi policy." And that's just one random letter from Truman, we've got scads of accounts from US soldiers, survivors, and European citizens. Famously Eisenhower held a press conference in 1945 where he said "When I found the first camp like that I think I was never so angry in my life. The bestiality displayed there was not merely piled up bodies of people that had starved to death, but to follow out the road and see where they tried to evacuate them so they could still work, you could see where they sprawled on the road. You could go to their burial pits and see horrors that really I wouldn't even want to begin to describe. I think people ought to know about such things...It is something we have been trying desperately to find out, whether or not the German population as a whole knew about that. I can’t say. It does appear, from all the evidence we can find, that they were isolated areas and this one piece of evidence that the mayor being shown the thing and going home and hanging himself would indicate he didn’t know about it. On the other hand, what makes the story so thin with me is when we find these very high ranking Nazis denying knowledge of it. If they didn’t, they deliberately closed their eyes, that is all. As far as I’m concerned these people are just as guilty as anybody else – those high ranking Nazis – but I think it would be impossible to say, however, the German nation knew it as a whole. But a lot of them know it, because I told them to go out and give them a decent burial. We made a film an hour long and we have made many Germans look at it, and it is not pretty." To say that there are essentially no contemporaneous accounts is simply not true.
If you discount those accounts because they were by Americans, who were at war with the Germans, then you're holding an absurdly high bar for historical evidence. I doubt more than 10% of what we teach in history books could meet such a standard of evidence.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
2mo ago
Faith healing would only be easy to prove if it wasn't a miracle: as in, if it was a natural process that repeats itself given the necessary conditions. But nobody claims it's that: the claim is that God directly intervenes. Think about what would happen if you tried to test it: you watch as a faith healer prays to God to heal someone. If nothing happens the faith healer can always say that God chose not to heal her: and if she gets better, the skeptic can always say that she would have gotten better anyway! There are countless testimonies of miraculous healing out there. Even journal articles backed by medical evidence: but the skeptic can always say that something else must have caused it.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
9d ago
It's unlikely, but theoretically possible. It would be less crazy than the stuff that happened in 2020.
...a university putting out a statement that causes a chain reaction that leads to the President of the United States and a majority of Congress to change their position on providing military aid to Israel?
What happened in 2020 that was crazier than that?
I don't see a world where the US decides to stop providing military aid to Israel within the next decade, let alone in time to have an effect on the current conflict. Even if literally all the universities put out statements saying that they should! In my experience a university statement on a hot button political issue has never come close to anything like that kind of impact.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
20d ago
So, your claim is that the gas chamber at Dachau was not designed to execute humans, but merely to delouse. As proof of this you cite a source which claims the gas chamber at Dachau was designed to execute humans, but was never finished and so not used. This seems to support the fact you dispute, that this was a 'homicidal gas chamber' designed to execute people. This source makes me believe that perhaps the 7th Army's report was wrong about people being executed in the Dachau gas chamber, but does nothing to make me believe the ludicrous notion that it was designed for delousing. A delousing chamber labeled as a showering facility, with fake shower heads that lead nowhere. You know, to take the lice by surprise so they wouldn't be tipped off.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
20d ago
Eye witness accounts will be more reliable than human remains in the case of trying to determine whether Carthaginians really sacrificed children, particularly for something that occurred so long ago in the historical record. That doesn't mean that eye witness accounts are the only kind of evidence, or can never be wrong, it's just a recognition of the fact that testimony gives us more specific and more reliable information than trying to interpret 2,000 year old bones in a hole in the desert. When physical evidence matches eye witness testimony it gives that testimony more credibility, but if you dig up Carthage and you can't find pits full of baby bones that means either the eye witness was not reliable, or that no physical evidence survived the passage of time, or evidence survived the passage of time and you haven't found it yet.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
21d ago
Between 1948 and 1980 Arab nations such as Yeman, Iraq, Morroco, Lebenon, Syria, (and Iran, but they're Persian, not Arab) expelled around 800,000 Jews. Some left voluntarily, others were forced out by official policy, others by riots and pogroms. In 1948 there were around 800,000 Jews living in North Africa and the Middle East (excepting Israel): today there are about 3,500. A great many of those Jews had their land stolen from them and left with what they could carry away.
I can't say I support the policies that led to the ethnic cleansing of Jews from the Arab world: but given that it happened, I certainly do not support Jews going to war against the Arab world until they get their land back! Similarly, I'm not sure if I support Israel conquering Gaza and the West Bank, but I certainly don't support the status quo of all these Palestinians refusing to live in peace until they have their land back. They're not realistically getting their land back. It is time to move on, and make a better life.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
9d ago
See though, that strikes me as much more probable than the university statement thing. That fits within my understanding of how the world works. American sports has a recent history of doing stupid stuff, and people freak out about criminals being killed by police all the time. When was the last time a statement from a university affected anything?
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
4mo ago
Markets have proven to be very robust decentralized systems for allocating resources: if it is true that growth was higher before central banks started recession proofing, then there's an argument to be made that natural volatility is more optimal then our current level of volatility.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
4mo ago
You don't get to decide what speech is or is not appropriate! That's the whole point! If you don't like it, put up your own poster: but what is or is not allowed to be said in the public square is not based on your opinions. That's the whole point of the 1st Amendment.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
4mo ago
I don't like ads, but I don't tear them down.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
4mo ago
Why would you say that someone with a contemporary scientific worldview would find it harder to believe in the virgin birth than Joseph did? What have we learned since then that makes it harder to believe? Surely knowing the mechanics of fertilization and early human development doesn't change the fact that people in those days knew just as well as we do that you don't get pregnant without a father involved.
In both cases believing in a miraculous birth is believing in supernatural intervention, violating the natural order. It should be just as easy or difficult to believe in any age. What have we learned since then that would change that?
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
10mo ago
Is there a point to eating more carbs?
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
10mo ago
Might have been better off going West instead of East. Eastern religions seem to float people down the stream of this particular blackpill, while the various forms of Christianity attempt to row against that current. Say what you will about Christianity, but it is very insistent that the self is real, and that our choices matter immensely (Calvinism aside).
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
10mo ago
Even if your current protein intake is sufficient, there really isn't harm in getting more protein, and there could be a lot of benefit. So I would try to up protein rather than increase carbs.
If upping protein isn't an option because it's too satiating and you just can't get enough calories that way, then I would suggest increasing fat. It gets you more calories for your efforts, and it seems to be less harmful than carbs in general.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
10mo ago
I do not, and never have, advised anyone to pretend that they believe something they don't. That would be dishonest, and dishonesty is a vice.
I don't see how the advice I gave "wouldn't work" if you have intellectual honesty about your own beliefs. You do not need to believe in God to attempt a prayer, or to attend a church, or to read the Bible with an open mind.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
1mo ago
If I had to choose I would say I prefer the second option you laid out, but I'm still not sure I understand the hypothetical Jesuit objection. I mean, nobody makes a choice (or at least not an important choice, such as, say, choosing to accept God's grace) without reasons for doing so. I'm not sure what a choice that is undetermined-by-causation would look like. Everything that comes into existence has a cause, that's Aquinas 101. Our choices are no different. Were (are?) the Jesuits not fans of Aquinas.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
4mo ago
Yes! You do! Unless it's a place where it's illegal to put up posters, you totally get to do that!
If someone put up missing posters of Gazan children buried in rubble, it would still be a pretty awful move for someone to tear them down. You don't tear down other people's posters, and doing so looks especially bad when the posters are raising awareness of dead kids.
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