HereAndGone
25d ago
God's law in stoning people like you to death
Old Testament law, now we are under the New Testament grace, not law (since Kirk was a Christian, not a Jew). I think the problem has arisen from American Protestants hammering the Old Testament and ignoring the New except for the epistles of St. Paul.
Charlie Kirk believed it was part of God's perfect moral law that people who are my friends, my family, my coworkers should be stoned to death.
I don't know the guy or any of his beliefs, and there's a lot of this sort of "he was a violent transphobe" etc. rhetoric online. So can you direct me to where he said that (like the quotes about gun deaths and the 2nd amendment rights) or is it just "well he was a Christian, therefore he believed in the Bible, therefore he accepted what the Bible says about X/Y/Z, therefore he wanted me stoned to death" chain of inference?
EDIT: I ask this because I remember the fighting over gay rights where people on all sides were quoting Leviticus, and it was considered a killer put-down to ask those against gay rights "so do you wear poly-cotton mix clothing? do you eat shrimp? because those are banned too, you know!" and to say 'if you don't keep all the laws and taboos, you are being a hypocrite and don't have religious objections'.
However, those on the liberal side (generally liberal Christians) also liked to quote, in the context of illegal immigrants, the parts about "Do not ill-treat foreigners who are living in your land. Treat them as you would a fellow-Israelite, and love them as you love yourselves. Remember that you were once foreigners in the land of Egypt. I am the LORD your God", except you know - that's in the same list as the mixed materials and anti-witchcraft, so are they stoning witches to death? no? then they're hypocrites and not acting out of religious belief!
People cherrypick parts of Scripture all the time; it would be entirely possible for Kirk to be anti-gay marriage but not want gays stoned to death.
HereAndGone
25d ago
It seems to be that, weirdly, luxury goods (like iPhones) are getting cheaper or at least more affordable, while the basics (rent, food) are going up in price and zooming up in some instances.
We're getting a version of that Agatha Christies quote: "I never thought I'd be rich enough to own a car, or poor enough not to have servants".
HereAndGone
25d ago
I know everyone goes Ireland cheats
Well, we do. Strip out the American multinationals we have been assiduously courting for decades, and the real figures are much lower.
Second, the 2008 crash really hit us hard. We went from Celtic Tiger to "down there with Greece with the begging bowl" economy and the years of austerity budgets to make up for that. Primarily due to some very bad decisions by our finance minister and government about bailing out the banks, but that's a whole other complaint.
When the bubble burst, it burst very hard and we're still not quite back to where we were. Then when things began to look a little better, along comes Covid and shuts down the country (and indeed the global economy) for practically an entire year.
HereAndGone
26d ago
For one thing, AIs are notoriously agreeable (and hence unreliable) since they are not programmed to tell you "this is a heap of shit" but rather "wow, your points are so cogent, your writing so sharp and impactful! I am so impressed my body is literally shaking with delight right now!"
For another, dear Lord, has even TheMotte succumbed to artifice now and we no longer generate our own outraged reactions the traditional way, with unthinking immediate reaction based on misfiring brain cells, but rather expect Big Sibling AI to vet our rage posts for us?
HereAndGone
26d ago
I do remember those, but at least the writers were safely mediocre nobodies. This person has minor notoriety about being extremely unpleasant (plus look at those crazy eyes) so how did a comics publisher think "ah yes, exactly the kind of writer who will do stories that will revitalise the title and bring in new sales"?
HereAndGone
26d ago
They're claiming it was unfortunate timing:
We want to address something that happened during our TMZ Livestream coverage of the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
As Harvey and Charles were reporting the developments in our newsroom, there were employees in another part of the building watching a car chase.
The people watching that car chase began laughing and clapping in reaction to what they were seeing, but we want to make it clear ... they were not cheering in response to the assassination.
Nevertheless ... watching a car chase at that moment was tone deaf, and the sounds of laughter at that crucial moment were totally out of line.
We apologize to anyone who heard that as we were in the middle of covering such a tragic story.
I have no idea who or what TMZ is, so I have no opinion one way or the other if this is true, but it's only fair to give them a chance to reply.
HereAndGone
26d ago
Felker-Martin was writing a new series for DC about Red Hood
Man, DC is really scraping the bottom of the barrel. How on earth did this specimen wangle that?
HereAndGone
26d ago
I'm surprised by this shooting, I know nothing about Charlie Kirk except mentions online where I got the impression that he was some guy on the right. The only things I've seen about him have been, for instance, in a recent dispute online about "is Gavin Newsom a transphobe?" where someone in the comments gave out about Newsom being on a podcast with Charlie Kirkkk (yes, three Ks, KKK geddit?)
So that was my view of their view of him: he is (of course) a fascist Nazi white supremacist because he's a right-wing conservative.
And now this happened.
We have no idea what the killer's motivations were, so backseat psychiatry about "was this just another crazy disgruntled person?" is useless. But I do hope it was a random crazy. If someone really thought "right-wingers are all Nazis, and everyone agrees that it's okay to kill a Nazi", then things in America are really bad right now. I hope they're not at that stage yet (or ever).
HereAndGone
26d ago
So, please attempt to modulate the 'tism a little
Are you being ableist at me? Mommy, mommy, Tollbooth was mean to me!
HereAndGone
27d ago
There really is less media coverage of crimes against Black victims for what I see as complex and circular reasons: for better or worse, nobody really cares about murders in "the hood"
No new thing; from the 1940 novel "Farewell, My Lovely" by Raymond Chandler where a policeman is disappointed to be the one lumbered with a killing (by a white guy) of the black manager of a bar, because he needs a big case and nobody cares about this sort of crime (warning for period language, as per the best publications*):
A man named Nulty got the case, a lean-jawed sourpuss with long yellow hands which he kept folded over his kneecaps most of the time he talked to me. He was a detective-lieutenant attached to the 77th Street Division and we talked in a bare room with two small desks against opposite walls and room to move between them, if two people didn't try it at once. Dirty brown linoleum covered the floor and the smell of old cigar butts hung in the air. Nulty's shirt was frayed and his coat sleeves had been turned in at the cuffs. He looked poor enough to be honest, but he didn't look like a man who could deal with Moose Malloy.
He lit half of a cigar and threw the match on the floor, where a lot of company was waiting for it. His voice said bitterly:
"Shines. Another shine killing. That's what I rate after eighteen years in this man's police department. No pix, no space, not even four lines in the want-ad section."
…Nulty spit in the wastebasket again. "I'll get him," he said, "about the time I get my third set of teeth. How many guys is put on it? One. Listen, you know why? No space. One time there was five smokes carved Harlem sunsets on each other down on East Eighty-four. One of them was cold already. There was blood on the furniture, blood on the walls, blood even on the ceiling. I go down and outside the house a guy that works on the Chronicle, a newshawk, is coming off the porch and getting into his car. He makes a face at us and says, 'Aw, hell, shines,' and gets in his heap and goes away. Don't even go in the house."
*"The original short stories reprinted in the British Library Tales of the Weird series were written and published in a period ranging across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. There are many elements of these stories which continue to entertain modern readers; however, in some cases there are also uses of language, instances of stereotyping and some attitudes expressed by narrators or characters which may not be endorsed by the publishing standards of today. We acknowledge therefore that some elements in the stories selected for reprinting may continue to make uncomfortable reading for some of our audience."
HereAndGone
28d ago
Pre-perestroika and all that, the Russians/Soviets were the go-to villain for every Hollywood action blockbuster. You didn't need deep exploration of characterisation, they're Russians? They're the Bad Guys!
HereAndGone
28d ago
Or the typical A Very Irish Film.
She was going through pre-marriage counseling with her local Catholic priest. She was bemoaing the fact that, on a questionnaire she had her fiancee had to fill out, it asked "who will be handling the household finances?" "Tollbooth!" She steamed, "What am I supposed to do? Just stand barefoot in the kitchen all day with a baby on my hip?"
She was over-reacting, but it's not graven in stone that the man handles all the money. Plenty of traditional households had the women doing the budgeting and the man kept an allowance out of his paypacket.
It's a very important question, because if you don't have an agreement on that before you get together, there are all kinds of nasty surprises lying in store. Using the example of a family member of mine, they didn't have a pre-marriage course/church wedding. Husband handled all the finances. Except he didn't, and wife only found out when the tax demands etc. started coming hot and heavy. The kids' college funds had to be used to pay off all the debts and taxes and rent etc. he was supposedly paying, except he wasn't. And she never questioned him or tried finding out for herself how much money was coming in and were the bills being paid, because he used to get very huffy and upset about that. So by doing things like taking the kids' college funds and help from family, they got out of the hole.
And then a few years down the line, he did it again.
That's a marriage that needed someone to go "so who will be handling the finances?" before ever they got hitched, and if there was no agreement about "we'll share all information, there won't be secrecy, if I ask you did the rent get paid I am not nagging and belittling you", then no marriage.
Trad Girl needs to have that talk with her fiancé about "so do I run the household budget, do you, do we both? joint account, separate accounts? savings? names on deeds or other property ownership?" That's not "corruption of her modern mind instead of the traditional values she claims to hold", that's plain horse sense.
EDIT: Also Catholicism, even traditional (I'm not sure about capital T "Traditional") Catholicism isn't the same about headship and the wife must submit to the husband as (Evangelical) Protestantism. There's a more complementarian view where the wife rules in the domestic sphere and has more authority, in some areas, than the husband. So jokes about choke holds and managing new brides don't quite ring true. Managing the husband is more the reality 😁
HereAndGone
29d ago
Eh, I've always found SMBC to be a little too self-satisfied. As for memories, how much do you remember from when you were one year old? Or from when you were twelve? Every single day, not just a few highlights? And yet there is continuity of personality here. The idea of reincarnation is that the atman, the eternal part, the 'soul', has all the memories of past lives, it is the incarnation at this particular time does not remember (those past lives are like the early years of childhood).
HereAndGone
29d ago
If they can remove the brain, stick it in a tank, and keep it alive (hello, Mi-Go brain cylinders!) then they can probably transplant the brain into an android body, which gets around the problem of "which is the real person and which is the copy?"
HereAndGone
29d ago
Look, as an Irish person, it's very funny to have Alison Doody (Irish actress) playing the evil Englishwoman, and I'm sure she got a kick out of it for the exact same reason: it's the Brits versus the rest of us.
Is the nationalistic Indian movie being even-handed to the former colonial masters? No, you say? Oh let me fall back on my fainting couch in shock. Yeah, no surprise there. It's not a documentary, it's a rousing action-adventure movie that's about as historically sourced as any mid-20th century movie about Davey Crockett or George Washington. The two main characters never met in real life, but why let that get in the way of a good story to get the audience going "hell, yeah!" It's in the same spirit as Mise Éire (except we didn't have tigers).
Julie Davis of "Happy Catholic" gets it: review here, podcast here.
The over-the-top aspect also applies to the depictions of the British Raj which, to be fair, we've seen matches in some other South Indian films. The Raj are usually like the Nazis in our own movies — big, bad, and making you long for their demise.
HereAndGone
29d ago
regard for the mystery of the human person
And where did that come from? Oh, go back to the Enlightenment? And where did the Enlightenment happen? Why aren't we all living under the global Chinese idea of the dignity of the individual? The pan-African philosophy of the personhood of the human being?
This is fish not recognising the existence of water. All those lovely liberal values didn't precipitate out of the air, they were build on a foundation that goes back to those "late ancient (or medieval) metaphysics and morals and social structures" about "love your enemy", "who is my neighbour?" and the likes.
HereAndGone
30d ago
The point about the perfect copy and you both existing, before you are at the point of death, is that the perfect copy is a copy and not you. It is not the continuation of personality and experience of the biological you, as there is continuity between the sleeping you of last night and the waking you of today and the you of tomorrow. So if it is murder to kill you once the copy is made, then even if the copy is made when you are on the point of biological death and can no longer continue to be kept alive because you are too sick, injured, or aged to remain alive, then that copy is not continuation of you, the dying person. It's still a copy. Real you dies when your body and brain (and mind) dies, even if the copy thinks "okay, this is Me".
But I think there's little agreement between those who think a perfect copy is the same as them, and those who think the biological entity is them and a copy is only a copy.
HereAndGone
30d ago
I wasn't on Twitter at the time, but a lot of people on social media where I was involved did have a habit of going "Well so-and-so said this/contradicted what you are saying, and they're Blue Check, so they must be right and you must be wrong". The idea, so far as I could see, was not so much "this is a factual authority" as "this person has a badge of right thinking and being on the right side of history".
HereAndGone
30d ago
But the conversation would still have been possible without the deification of Floyd, who - whatever sort of death he suffered - was indeed a petty criminal engaging in fraud at the time of his death. I am not saying he deserved to die or that any one should be treated in that way, but the over-reaction afterwards was indeed like he was some martyr for religion. He wasn't a good guy. Bad guys also have human rights and shouldn't be killed by ignorance or malice, but the immediate emotional reaction was something like the death of Princess Diana where the real person got lost in this persona built up by a lot of hysteria and neediness, and has collapsed in the same way (Floyd's worship much faster than Diana's worship).
And worship is indeed the only word that I can find to fit - the mayor weeping while kneeling before the coffin, touching it like it's a relic? That's the kind of display that would have drawn the attention of Thomas Cromwell and invited a visitation from his commissioners about superstition and idolatry.
HereAndGone
30d ago
I think John Polkinghorne was the only theologian I’ve ever read that made a case similar to this. Even as a Catholic myself, most of the arguments I’ve seen Christian philosophers make against transhumanism are incredibly weak.
It could be that when physically embodied you dies, that releases the soul. Whatever digital copy has been made is only a recording, the same as a video (now) is a recording of image and voice but not the person. Or the AI emulations of people, I don't think it could be argued this is the real person still existing.
So the soul goes to the particular judgement, the silicon copy is just a dead thing - not alive, not ensouled, not a continuation of consciousness. I mean, we're getting into "is the soul the brain? is the soul the same thing as the mind? is the mind the brain?" questions here, and even if copies of the brain state can be made, is that the same thing as downloading the mind? And if we can download or transfer the mind, is that the same thing as the soul?
HereAndGone
30d ago
My conception of personal identity is pretty flexible, but it is in no way stretched beyond breaking point by the notion that a digital copy of me is - for my purposes - interchangeable with me.
Okay, thought experiment time. Let's say some friendly aliens drop by and they can do this. They produce a digital copy that is 100% identical to your brain state at the time they created it. Total fidelity. "Look!" they say, "this is you! Now step into the disintegration chamber, we'll just dispose of this meat body and leave digital you the only existing entity".
Would you do it? Would you really think "well sure, fine, me in this body being killed isn't any big deal, digital copy me is just as good" or would you go "hang on, that's going to kill me! That copy exists alongside me but isn't me!"
HereAndGone
30d ago
Once that's an option, we can trivially ensure that nothing short of vacuum decay or the end of the universe poses a meaningful risk.
Sure, once you can reliably work miracles, then that's trivial.
It was about more than taxes and hospital visits, the compromises around civil/domestic unions and partnerships would have given them that. They wanted marriage and nothing less, to force it into the mainstream. Whether or not breaking the last few shreds of bonds holding civil marriage together was worth it for society in the long run, it was a very successful tactic.
However, now there is no reason to treat "only two persons" as the sacred inviolable unchangeable number, so why not "these three or more people really, really love each other and only want to be able to file taxes and visit each other in the hospital?" when it comes to poly marriage down the line? We've generally increased the age at which it's legal to get married, but why not lower it (e.g. if we're going to bring the voting age down to 16, or if we think 14 year olds are mature enough to be having sex and using contraception) in future?
We've now reduced marriage to "the state must recognise we love each other until the time we don't and want to break up" and that's it.
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