Re: the Resurrection, I'm not convinced it was such a radical notion at the time
Paul says the crucified Messiah is the stumbling block and folly, because that bit requires a Messiah claimant to die without fulfilling the prophecies and be raised. If you're reading from a secular POV, you have strong reason to be skeptical of Jesus' prophecies of his own death and resurrection (just as everyone is skeptical of his prophecies about Jerusalem) so you have a yet another Messiah claimant being brutally disproved by being hung on a tree and then followed and seemingly deified by Jews (while every other such movement died out)
it being found empty would have been plenty good enough to start hopeful speculation that he had returned,
The problem is that Paul says that Jesus directly appeared to people like Peter who, unlike the Gospel writer, we believe are probably his contemporaries.
Between that and the reference to the appearance to the 500, it seems like someone had to have had some delusional/bereavement episode that then spread.
But the Christians who make the case - e.g. Habermas - often skip the tomb since it first appears in the Gospels (I think Crossan denies Jesus got a grave at all since criminals weren't supposed to, despite the story having a plausible explanation). They focus on a few "minimal facts" which even critical scholars allegedly agree on.
The half-dozen facts we usually use are these: 1) that Jesus died by crucifixion; 2) that very soon afterwards, his followers had real experiences that they thought were actual appearances of the risen Jesus; 3) that their lives were transformed as a result, even to the point of being willing to die specifically for their faith in the resurrection message; 4) that these things were taught very early, soon after the crucifixion; 5) that James, Jesus’ unbelieving brother, became a Christian due to his own experience that he thought was the resurrected Christ; and 6) that the Christian persecutor Paul (formerly Saul of Tarsus) also became a believer after a similar experience.
With those few facts, it is weird. How weird depends on how strong you think the borders between paganism and Christianity were. But it seems like at least someone, maybe Peter, had a delusion (or lied)
Tanista
2mo ago
In a post Sunday night on his Truth Social platform, Trump said he has authorized the Department of Commerce and the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative to slap a 100% tariff “on any and all Movies coming into our Country that are produced in Foreign Lands.”
“The Movie Industry in America is DYING a very fast death,” he wrote, complaining that other countries “are offering all sorts of incentives to draw” filmmakers and studios away from the U.S. “This is a concerted effort by other Nations and, therefore, a National Security threat. It is, in addition to everything else, messaging and propaganda!”
The White House said Monday that it was figuring out how to comply with the president’s wishes.
“Although no final decisions on foreign film tariffs have been made, the Administration is exploring all options to deliver on President Trump’s directive to safeguard our country’s national and economic security while Making Hollywood Great Again,” said spokesperson Kush Desai.
First of all: how is this an emergency? I don't follow the logic.
It's quite clear that Hollywood studios search for tax incentives both within and outside the US. That's nothing new. It is supposed to be getting worse. California is supposed to be suffering from this competition due to COL and alternatives., including in animation:
And the decision was emblematic of a trend that’s been accelerating over the last decade or so, according to data laid out in the study. Between 2010 and 2023, California’s share of the highest-grossing animated films dropped from 67 to 27 percent. Between 2019 and 2024 animation employment dropped by nearly five percent in California while other jurisdictions saw major upticks (more than 18 percent in New York, nearly 72 percent in British Columbia and nearly 13 percent in Ontario).
However, Hollywood gets the majority of the profit of VFX dominated films and maintains strong market share worldwide, especially at the higher budget ranges. The stories are still American-made.
The problem for film seems to be the confluence of increasing competition, COVID killing the habit and studios cannibalizing their own product. Would it really help to force all of these companies to produce and film stuff in the US, especially with AI looming? Seems like the problem of Indian VFX firms may solve itself.
I am seeing some takes on the more left-wing side that this is essentially Trump promising to break something in order to get another set of companies, and a perceived left-wing industry at that, to try to curry favor with him (he seems to be high on his ability to cause shocks merely by speaking). Though one wonders why he would. If this is a partisan thing the decay of California as the nexus for film and tv would be a win better than almost anything he could extract from them for the conservative movement.
Tanista
2mo ago
Grant that crazy attracts crazy, and whoever originated the more fantastical miracle stories may have likewise just been psychotic at the time, or something.
Or you ignore the traditional narrative that the Disciples wrote the Gospels in which case you don't need a hoax, or delusion. It's just later believers believing what they're told or extrapolating from what the Hebrew Bible says the Messiah will do, an old tactic and not a sign of being insane or mendacious.
Except for the original resurrection claim of course. Strangely, the Disciples may be better candidates for delusion than Jesus. It's possible that Jesus really did think he'd bring about the end of Roman rule in some political sense with God's help like many other unfortunate Jews of the time. But at least some of the Disciples clearly believed that he was resurrected , which is noted by Paul to be very odd by the beliefs of the time, and were willing to be martyred despite having a front-row seat to the mother of all disconfirming events.
I've actually seen this used as a modern version of the Lewis argument by secular Christians who can't appeal to miracle claims: the Disciples had first-hand knowledge and were devout Jews. It's insane for them to go with the divinity of a crucified criminal. Unless...
From a practical perspective applying the social responsibility to cultural producers also seems easier. It feels like they've weaseled out of that responsibility somehow
Quite the opposite. All we hear about is how cultural producers have vast control over the general society and how they should use those powers for good instead of abdicating their responsibility.
The rise of endlessly and self-consciously didactic work is a product of moralism not its absence.
But Vivek appears to have missed the last 30 years. Right after his youth came Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. The nerd became cool. Over the late-90s/early-2000s, the nerd was an ascendent underdog
Thats because what Vivek is actually complaining about is the absence of sufficient credentialism (in his eyes, I imagine many Americans think there's already too much).
He wants some South Korean/Indian model where people are told what to grind and then rewarded for meeting the goal with the right certificate.
The actual computer nerd hero origin story is about breaking the path, one way or another. You're cooler for dropping out of Stanford or some such school that an immigrant child would kill to get a degree from to do something amazing.
The Social Network has a scene laying this out. Zuck doesn't need the class. He's that good. That's the dream. Not getting a nice shiny A.
As for Woke Culture being the fault of nerds...debatable. I recall when nerds were the irreverent types. If anything, that was the line of attack: nerds were low SMV types who were inordinately pleased with themselves and resentful at women for not agreeing.
I remember when feminists were hunting nerds for wearing the wrong shirt or having the wrong opinion.
I'll cop to the dishonesty with which nerds approach their own sexuality. But , even here, we're downstream of a generation's worth of negative messaging about what nerdy men actually like. The overly-online "Step on me mommy" stuff is viscerally disgusting but it is safe/"unproblematic" after constant objectification discourse around unapologetic nerd thirsting for their sex symbols. In the real world it doesn't matter as much. But people don't want to be continually whined at or browbeaten online.
Why wouldn't it just be that what happened to everything else happened to nerd spaces too, especially since a lot of successful nerds were within the academy or tech companies in liberal states and nerds can be quite secular and progressive?
Tanista
2mo ago
I distinctly remember seeing the "ironic homosexuality to avoid asking a girl to dance" strat at our first high school dance, because it wasn't exactly common behavior to ape the gays.
It was mostly just anxiety I think. People grew out of it before the next year.
And there's no southern America that's richer and larger egging on Texas. There's no way they're equally improbable.
Tanista
2mo ago
the kids now see the gay or trans kid as a weird alien species of human not like them.
Seems logical but not how it played out IRL. LGBT identification has risen in younger generations.
Tanista
2mo ago
I mean, I didn't think he had strong opinions on LBJ-era affirmative action EOs either.
"Civility" I think we should hang on to or fight for. It is possible to be civil while maintaining moral disagreements. Happens all the time here and that's good.
The discussions that fly here civilly wouldn't be seen as such in many spaces, certainly school. Even that term carries baggage.
I'm also not sure it matters. "Diversity" may not have had the progressive meaning until it allowed one to discriminate on diversity grounds and now the term has been used as a license so often that invoking it in certain context just screams progressive thing. "Safety" was also ruined when it became useful.
It was clearly practical historically. I can see why a polity of a certain age would have specifically enshrined religious protections during its founding.
I'm not sure how practical it is now given the decline of religion and the rise of religions that are totally servile to CURRENT_YEAR mores and the existence of secular ideologies like Marxism and nationalism that are clearly capable of motivating stubborn behavior.
Given the Trump administrations' rooting around for left-wing orgs to cut, I'm a bit suspicious that nothing has come out about this if it is the case. They've found much less notable forms of weird behavior.
Tanista
3mo ago
There is no evidence that the groups that are noticing now would ever keep their noticing private. Especially on a Yglesian model where no one questioned their underlying assumptions. What reason would they have to stop something they've always done?
Progressives see a measure of prestige that implies a hierarchy with some people or institutions ending up with less, and try to "fix" this by rejiggering the measure to be more fair on the grounds that prestige will then be more fairly divided, ignoring that some hierarchies are not purely arbitrary and can't be molded that way.
Tanista
3mo ago
Have color-blind admission policies and don't care about the outcomes, and there is really no good reason for any decent person to wonder why there are more Ashkenazi than Black faculty members.
I don't know how anyone could believe this about our world. Maybe a different one with a different history, but there's just no way people here don't notice.
But then the wokes decided that a system which produces disparate outcomes must be unfair.
They decided on it because they noticed color-blind meritocracy wasn't getting the job done.
Tanista
3mo ago
There are obviously dissenters, but the pro-equality bureaucracy trans activists hijack is far more popular when used for its original purposes than for this stuff. I'm of the opinion that that general ethos/bureaucracy created the problem but most people are not willing to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
In countries like the US this is even more obvious than in Britain because the laws often being exploited for trans activism (Title IX) were clearly about sex and have to be turned to a new purpose by much less accountable Presidential actions compared to passing a new law.
That's why there's so much forced teaming and the constant implication that being anti-trans is in some way racist.
I have no problem with a principled attack on quotas. "Why do you care if it's only one?" is what I find meaningless.
Because:
Again, I think that the numbers matter.
The principle matters, especially when we're dealing with something that clearly can spread and has no strong limiting factor. People used to make these arguments in sport because no one ever saw a transwoman win. No one can guarantee it'll stay within the bounds of their proportion of the population.
People who actually dislike quotas should be the people most confident about this it seems? Presumably you think men are overrepresented in certain spaces for a reason. Letting them identify as women will just cause this overrepresentation to spill over.
On a much more basic level one wonders what the point is? Are people who were raised as men up until X year (sometimes they transition already into middle age) saddled with the same problems that prevent female advancement?
But whatever, apparently we have quotas. If you have, say eight out of 20 board appointments thanks to your quota, and then you bitch that one of them is a trans-woman when that seat is clearly the birth-right of a biological woman, that seems incredibly petty.
Quotas can be good or bad. But, if a society has already accepted the need for a quota system, trying to police who is allowed in is the least petty thing in the world.
It would be absolutely horrible for a feminist quota system if everyone could just say that men counted for their purposes and the underrepresentation problem was declared solved as a result.
Thinking otherwise is, ironically, a form of woke reasoning.
Yes you need to sit down and budget, but you also need to understand the difference between a good purchase and a bad one, understand that rent and other bills come before entertainment in the budget, and understand how to get more bang for your buck.
CICO without cheating (which is why we always emphasize actual tracking) makes this clear. Or clear enough for weight loss.
Knowing the calories you get out of a Snickers bar, given your daily caloric needs and the satiation you get from it, lets you know how bad a decision it is. Once you set a ceiling you can easily see which foods are inefficient.
And, if you choose to indulge, you'll have to fast or exercise later (which you'll probably enjoy even less, proving the point) or compensate with some satiating, low-calorie foods.
People who come up with a fixed budget and can't decide between Netflix or rent have a problem but it isn't ignorance.
Tanista
3mo ago
Drug addicts can admit that they're doing drugs. Doing drugs is a discrete act from non-drug, non-destructive acts.
Speaking from direct experience: Food addicts either don't know or actively convince themselves that they haven't crossed the threshold between eating and gluttony. Their mental math never bothers to account for that extra quarter cup of canola oil they dumped into the pan. They don't have a good sense or willfully refuse to investigate how calorie dense a cup of berries is compared to a cup of Nutella compared to a cup of jam. The direct relationship between that snack (which they may forget when they go back to tally at the end of the day) and the amount of time it'd take to burn it are conveniently uninvestigated.
When some people are forced to stare this in the face with strict CICO, they make better decisions.
They just wanted to stop the USG from spending American tax dollars to fund ridiculous frivolous bullshit like communist rap albums and teaching lesbian farmers about sustainability.
The claim was that they were gonna meaningfully cut the deficit (Elon originally gave a figure of 1 trillion at least).
If they merely wanted to cut a left wing patronage network to size they could have said that and aimed lower.
"I think we will have accomplished most of the work required to reduce the deficit by a trillion dollars within that timeframe," Musk told the Fox News anchor Bret Baier during a panel interview with top members of the DOGE team.
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-lowers-doges-estimated-savings-again-2025-4
"We've got a $2 trillion deficit," Musk said. "If we don't do something about this deficit, the country's going bankrupt….Interest payments alone on the national debt exceed the Defense Department budget, which is shocking [because] we spend a lot of money on defense. And if that just keeps going, we're essentially gonna bankrupt the country….It's not optional for us to reduce the federal expenses; it's essential. It's essential for America to remain solvent as a country. And it's essential for America to have the resources necessary to provide things to its citizens and not simply be servicing vast amounts of debt." https://reason.com/2025/02/12/elon-musk-implausibly-claims-competence-and-caring-can-cut-the-federal-budget-deficit-in-half/
Some people may have also wanted to starve the beast but the point was sustainability.
If the argument is that people expected the government to do this by cutting mosquito nets to Africans and sinecures to left wing professors and not welfare then that is really just the oldest argument against populism: what you actually get if you try to come up with policies based solely on what's popular with people is incoherence and stupidity.
It's clearly a case of hopes and wishes against basic reality. Attacking waste is popular, attacking the deficit is popular in theory. It would be awesome if people teaching Afghans conceptual art were squirreling away hundreds of billions.
There's a different party on each end of the trade. The route between those parties being protected benefits both and hurts nobody.
So what? Plenty of people benefit from public goods or are not harmed by them directly and yet they often never get built or decay as parties see it in their interests to exploit the commons.
A sword is a sword. The same ability to protect sea lanes opens the risk of a party trying to control it. The more parties you have with serious navies with no absolute superior the more the temptations rise. The more a party might wonder why it must accept losing a valuable natural resource to a rival or opponent and then be forced to protect that opponent's trade.
Nations that have amicable relations today like Western Europeans cannot agree on a European army or how it is to be used. Why would we assume this would change in a world without America?
The simple temptation here is just...to not do that. Let them fend for themselves and protect your own trade. Then the next temptation for other parties is to prey on those who either can't or they have rivalries with. And then there's the temptation to lock weaker nations into trading only with you, which may strictly be worse than a totally free trading system, but balances the costs of your navy with more control because you assume someone else is planning the same thing.
Indeed, but that's hardly insurmountable with a bit of will and training.
Demographic decline is not a matter of a bit of will. The European nations that once protected their own spheres are in terminal demographic decline. They don't have the bodies, they don't have the money (because of welfare, not the military) and the world has changed.
But it also just is insurmountable for many nations.
America can blow up everyone that'd interdict its trade. How about Poland? Lesotho? Indonesia? Ghana? What about when the trade is being stopped by a legitimately powerful nation like Iran?
Agree. But I don't agree that reduced trade or living standards means the "end of globalism".
I mean, if you take the broadest definition of globalism, sure.
The trade system we know and take for granted (that some call globalism pejoratively) would in fact end and it would be a noticeable change and drop in the living standards of a lot of people.
Rome built roads and pushed back on the barbarians in the north.
Rome did not protect trade for foreign nations (even trade Rome wasn't a participant in) without a demand for absorption into the Roman state.
Building infrastructure within your own borders and pushing back on the barbarians on the periphery are simply standard expectations for all states not free trade policy.
Eh. Whether or not Jesus did exist, I think you're vastly overestimating how much scholars care what laymen think. There are some who make bank off laymen like Ehrman but he's atypical. For most, it's just not that interesting and yields little status or new research. Richard Carrier is actually a historian and even he gets little attention, nobody cares that much what Hitchensfan2909 is doing.
Scholars didn't reason backwards from the cringe. They already believed that Jesus was a historical figure long before the internet cringe started and simply don't want to deal with it.
Professional consequences also doesn't explain it all. Yes, the scholars in religious institutions often have to swear to faith statements and can be fired if they deviate from doctrine. But these people are obvious - Mike Licona lost his job for denying the literal raising of the saints in Matthew. Like...no one is under the impression that he or anyone in his position would deny Jesus' existence.
But critical scholars in more secular spaces have said some pretty offensive and lurid things from the perspective of traditional doctrine (Dominic Crossan iirc denies Jesus was given a tomb and claims that he was tossed into a mass grave and left to scavengers like any criminal) and they get away with it all the time.
If we're going to psychoanalyze, I think you actually accurately represent the general public's intuition that skepticism of Jesus' existence is more radical than the alternative and their suspicion that people are dodging it out of deference to religion (or their underestimation of just how hostile critical scholarship can be to traditional doctrine). And I think this impression is why mythicism is so attractive to atheists despite their usual deference to expertise.
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