Stellula
11d ago
Just to further drive this point home: the narcos are engaged in what is effectively chemical warfare. They are in the process of violating the GC when they were shot out of the water.
Stellula
28d ago
ChatGPT answered this question just find.
Short answer: Yes, a politician can claim it, but the claim is internally inconsistent with the core teachings attributed to Jesus.
Here’s the clean breakdown without soft-pedaling anything:
- What Jesus actually commanded
Jesus’s explicit moral directives include: • Radical, unilateral compassion (Matthew 5–7). • Care for the foreigner (Matthew 25; repeated in Torah citations). • Protection of the poor and vulnerable. • Refusal to use coercive force in moral disputes (“put your sword back”).
There is no textual basis for Jesus endorsing state violence against outsiders, the poor, or the displaced.
- What ICE does
ICE agents: • Track and seize impoverished people, often with guns drawn. • Separate families. • Transport and deport them by force. These are deliberate state actions using threats of lethal force to detain individuals who usually pose no violent threat.
- The contradiction
A politician who: 1. Publicly claims to follow Jesus’s teachings and simultaneously 2. Supports the state hunting down poor foreigners at gunpoint and removing them from the country
…is making a claim that conflicts with the documented ethical demands Jesus laid down.
There is no credible reading of the gospels in which Jesus would approve of using armed agents to remove vulnerable outsiders. The closest parallels (the Good Samaritan, Matthew 25’s judgment of nations, his warnings about harming “the least of these”) point in the opposite direction.
- So would Jesus be disappointed?
Based solely on the text: Yes. He consistently condemned leaders who used power against the weak while claiming religious legitimacy. This is exactly the type of behavior he targeted in his most severe critiques.
If you want, I can outline the specific gospel passages that make the contradiction unavoidable.
If any of you are on the tech/ai/startup side of x (which I imagine is everybody here), you probably saw the following exchange:
A guy working as 'head of AI' for a company called Cline commented "Imagine the smell" under a photo of a hackathon.
Indians assumed that somebody commenting on the smellyness of a hackathon (I've been to many hackathons, and nerds smell) must be commenting on Indians, and thus freaked out.
The guy who made the comment replied to some of them saying that no, actually, he was just making a common internetism, and generally speaking to the smell of a bunch of guys in a packed room.
The guy's boss gets involved, surely due to the campaign by online Indians to get him fired, saying that he wouldn't be firing anybody.
Enough pressure happened that the guy's boss recanted, and fired the guy.
Now the internet is imagining a lot of smells, cline has earned a ton of bad will, and the general dislike of Indians in the tech community has grown.
Here are some thoughts on this:
I'm increasingly of the opinion that people should be able to filter the internet by country. I don't care what people from 9000 miles away, from a totally different culture, who have no investment or stake in my society have to say about it. I don't want to interact with these people. My life and my world is not a place for them to wage petty dramas and entertain themselves by harassing people here.
Indians specifically (and I say this as somebody who has spent a considerable amount of time in India, consuming indian culturalisms, and interacting with Indians) seem to have a particular penchant for online drama. There seems to be a particular focus on people saving or losing some form of "face", although that isn't exactly it. It's similar to honor culture you find in other societies, but maybe just its own Indian brand of it. I think what we're seeing here are two cultures which should be separated by 10,000 miles of ocean running into each other on the internet; the clash should not be unexpected.
"Imagine the smell" is not an anti-Indian slur, or at least it wasn't. It comes from image boards, and gets said under almost any moderately interesting photo of people. However, I think the massive freak out over this has turned it into one. Interdesting.
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