MayorofOysterville
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User ID: 3800
MayorofOysterville
3d ago
Aren't we living under the conditions of an Israeli victory now. They can act as they will and annex what they want. Most of the West Bank is functionally integrated into Israel already and the only reason they don't annex it is so they don't need to give the Palestinian population there citizenship.
MayorofOysterville
3d ago
Sure and that's reasonable. But the situation in the West Bank is also completely unique and completely untenable long term. If Israel could agree on some sort of border it would work better. But they want the land and not the people and most of the West Bank is essentially fully integrated into Israel ignoring the blobs of Palestinian towns throughout. If Israel drew a line and declared one part Palestine and one part Israel I think they'd get reasonable far many countries have disputed borders. But the West Bank is a millstone around their neck because they want the land but not the people and the occupation prevents them from being a normal country.
MayorofOysterville
3d ago
They managed to create a permanent peace with Syria and Egypt even with the Golan heights and no peace agreement and the West Bank has towns under full Palestinian control. I think a State of Palestine would be a lot less likely to just start a war then stateless terrorist groups.
MayorofOysterville
3d ago
But they haven't yet been able to expel the population and I don't know if they realistically can. So far they've just been settling the gaps and ignoring the Palestinian settlements but this doesn't seem stable.
MayorofOysterville
3d ago
I don't think 3 has any chance of turning into 2. Even with the 1948 borders the Israeli military would still massively outclass the Palestinian one.
MayorofOysterville
5d ago
Yeah you'd think he'd defect to the Russians or something then. The worry about the UN creating a one world government seems incredibly naive for someone as plugged in as him. The idea of the UN being more than a discussion forum and aid distribution force of the great powers is fanciful.
MayorofOysterville
5d ago
I'm very confused about this speech and Peter Thiel's religious beliefs. Because as far as I can tell he doesn't practice Christianity in his daily life the only Christian denominations that would accept him being a homosexual are very liberal and don't care about Armageddon. And I can't see him being an Episcopalian. It just doesn't fit my mental model of him at all and I don't understand how a gay German techlord is giving talks like an Evangelical preacher?
Unless it's some kind of Jordan Peterson metaphor thing? But it doesn't appear to be. Can anyone explain where this came from?
MayorofOysterville
5d ago
Well maybe, I won't deny envy as a factor, but the ability to buy property is another huge factor. People who can afford property tend to be a lot more content than those who can't. Regardless of wealth disparity or relative social class.
MayorofOysterville
5d ago
I think another point is the workers in Starbucks aren't paid very much. Engineers are less likely to care about CEO pay than baristas because they baristas are essential to the operations of Starbucks but don't make that much thus the CEO getting 95 million off their labor is especially unfair.
MayorofOysterville
5d ago
The media ancestral human was a hunter gatherer.
MayorofOysterville
5d ago
Elon Musk and Warren Buffet are bad examples though as they are Great Men, with a mythos and not easily replaced. Most CEOs are interchangeable faceless suits not visionary founders.
MayorofOysterville
12d ago
If Blacks and Whites are equal in their civilizational capacity, (insert the entire civil rights project here). If Blacks' civilizational capacity is substantially inferior to that of Whites, there is little reason to keep a large population of them in a White society; in fact, there is a strong incentive to kick them out of said society. Said Blacks would suffer greatly by being removed from the White society they inhabit, so they deny HBD and push their own counter-memes.
This requires a few jumps. Very few people are not willing to admit that stupid people exist and that they tend to have stupid children. And yet there isn't a mass movement to remove stupid people from society. It's a long way to go from HBD theories proven right to strip all Black Americans of citizenship and ship them to Africa. And when people widely believed in Black inferiority they didn't actually do that Liberia was a failed utopian experiment one of many for it's time.
MayorofOysterville
12d ago
The most unrealistic part of this is that illiterate morons could ever navigate the insane paperwork to adopt a kid.
MayorofOysterville
12d ago
I meant more the policies. Mao died peacefully in his sleep and the CCP still rules China. But Mao's death still hung the Maoists out to dry same with Stalin and Lysenko and his followers.
MayorofOysterville
15d ago
Yeah that works great until it doesn't. Revolutions can be pretty swingy once your favored dear leader dies the next one can reverse his policies. It's totally legal to start up an opposing university now. Less so in authoritarian Catholic land.
MayorofOysterville
15d ago
I'd rather not get rid of democracy to fight the libs in academia.
MayorofOysterville
15d ago
if giving Ken Ham is the solution to left wing bias in universities' I think I'll just stick with annoying liberal groupthink.
MayorofOysterville
15d ago
But isn't seizing the universities and gifting them to the right wing just like some sort of reverse socialism and affirmative action?
MayorofOysterville
15d ago
Don't places like BYU and Liberty university kind of disprove this? I actually don't think this would be a failure mode. I think the right wing vs neutral would be a bigger problem. Anyway BYU is accredited reasonably well regarded and kicks out students for drinking, premarital sex and homosexuality I doubt a Motte approved right wing university would be more conservative then that.
MayorofOysterville
16d ago
Sure, but that also gets to the problem with Protestants. Treating a book as infallible that was created by a church you reject. You could make some apologism for this by pointing out the books of the Bible were really written separately until they were compiled but yeah I think it's a big problem for anyone not Catholic or Orthodox.
MayorofOysterville
17d ago
It's not just the form but the content as well. Praying to Jesus drawing lessons from the gospels, putting up nativity scenes.
MayorofOysterville
17d ago
Yes but it's more than vibes. The same prayers the same hymns, the eucharist, and drawing lessons from the Bible and gospels. It's the content too not just the forms.
MayorofOysterville
17d ago
They themselves presumably agree on this principle, because as you note, they believe that all traditional churches have fallen from the faith.
I think this is the key issue we've been going round on. Mormons don't see Christianity as synonymous with the true faith. The see Christianity as a big tent full of many denominations and their own Church as the true faith within that big tent. This is also why I don't think the trinity is a useful tenant for determining what is and isn't Christianity. Because from extremely early on the umbrella of Christianity. This is my personal view as well. I see Christianity as a big movement of many mutually exclusive Christianities even from the beginning. (see Paul's letters) And I don't think removing them from the category of Christianity is much use, we'd just have to come up with another term to categorize these Jesus worshipping movements. Also for someone without a Christian background the trinity may not even seem that that important. To someone not primed to see it, the father son and holy ghost being one in purpose but not in being versus different aspects of God together and separate in divine mystery, doesn't seem THAT different. Especially compared to things like worshipping graven images or praying to the saints and Mary.
Just as many Sunni Muslims try to exclude the Shia from Islam and insist they aren't Muslims. This just devolves into silly language games. The Ebionites, the Marcionites, the Arians obviously all fit under some category with the Orthodox. Virtually every university and textbook everywhere calls that thing Christianity and if we exclude them from it then we need to create an umbrella term for them. Which again seems redundant when we already have terms for these. But this debate actually only seems to come up in relation to modern American religions because Mormons seem weird to Americans and nobody uses they word Heretic anymore so they get excluded from Christianity.
But I think Christianity is too big a tent to do that. Fundamentally woke high church Episcopalians and Independent Fundamentalist Baptists believe extremely different things and live extremely different lives if they can be under the umbrella of Christianity so can the Mormons because the word Christianity does not describe one particular tradition but rather many disparate traditions which is the whole reason we have denominations in the first place!
MayorofOysterville
17d ago
Well I think they are wrong. Mormons obviously fit a patter of American restorationist movements and just because they fall outside echumenical Orthodoxy doesn't mean they shouldn't be considered Christians.
That's why the West Bank is such a millstone though. They won it in war but now they need to either integrate it or give it up. Keeping it in limbo is the source of all their problems. If Israel could actually enunciate their borders they wouldn't need to negotiate or accept anything from the Palestinians at all. The haven't needed Syria to agree to them having the Golan Heights for example. Maintaining this quasi sovereignty indefinitely is the source of essentially all their problems both internal and external.
And now yes because of Hamas handing over anything is tricky. But they had decades where they could have handed whatever rump state they wanted to the PLO. And they wouldn't have needed their agreement anymore than they need Syria's for the Golan。
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