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distic


				

				

				
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joined 2022 September 08 20:21:04 UTC

				

User ID: 1034

distic


				
				
				

				
0 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 08 20:21:04 UTC

					

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User ID: 1034

There is always this stupid idea that if only we were a bit kinder with those leaders (be it Hitler, Putin or others), if we had made just one or two small concessions, there would have been no war. But this is a complete misunderstanding of the nature of their regime. Whatever you give them, they see as a sign of weakness, a proof that they can push harder. You negociated with me about Syria, so that I can do anything there? I will also take Ukraine. You give me Danzig? I will also take Alsace. It's a game where they can only win: either you give them what they want, and they are stronger and can push for more, or you don't, and they get a casus belli.

EDIT:

In the wake of the 9/11 Attacks, the Jewish Neocons stampeded America towards the disastrous Iraq War and the resulting destruction of the Middle East, with the talking heads on our television sets endlessly claiming that “Saddam Hussein is another Hitler.”

By the way, I remember quite precisely what happened, and the jews were not responsible of it. All of America wanted this war. The people who opposed it took a ton of shit. You probably wanted this war yourself. But I guess it is easier to blame the stupid choices you made on the jews.

This helpful article from Wikipedia may explain it all to you, it certainly opened my eyes:

Far-right politics, also referred to as the extreme right or right-wing extremism, are political beliefs and actions further to the right of the left–right political spectrum than the standard political right, particularly in terms of being radically conservative, ultra-nationalist, and authoritarian, as well as having nativist ideologies and tendencies.

Historically, "far-right politics" has been used to describe the experiences of fascism, Nazism, and Falangism. Contemporary definitions now include neo-fascism, neo-Nazism, the Third Position, the alt-right, racial supremacism, National Bolshevism and other ideologies or organizations that feature aspects of authoritarian, ultra-nationalist, chauvinist, xenophobic, theocratic, racist, homophobic, transphobic, and/or reactionary views.

If Sanderson believes his church's teachings, and his church teaches that gay acts are sinful, then his church is homophobic. And being homophobic means you are far-right, which means you're the same thing as a Nazi. Doesn't matter if he never personally burned a gay or trans person at the stake, until and unless he denounces Mormonism and acknowledges his guilt and accepts he was wrong all along, he's a Nazi. And you don't tolerate Nazis, now do you?

You are drawing so much conclusions from a factual wikipedia article.

  1. It is a fact that the nazis were homophobic. It is also a fact that the nazis were far right, and also a fact that homophobia is a view held by a lot of far-right people. Are you challenging any one of these facts? It does not mean that if you are homophobic you are far right or a nazi. You know, most people have two legs but birds aren't people. By the way, you should have noted the "and/or" in the list, which suggests that far right people hold several of those views, not just one.

  2. "Doesn't matter if he never personally burned a gay or trans person at the stake, [...] he's a Nazi." When you do this comment, it seems to me you are saying that anyone who did not personally burned anyone cannot be a Nazi. In this case, there have been very few nazis. Hitler, for example, did not burn anyone "personally", as far as I know. At the end, the holocaust was organized in such a way that almost no one had to kill anyone directly. Not every nazi is a war criminal. Most nazis were just people like you and me that lived their lives peacefully. They just happened to vote for some nazi guy once, and to help the regime once in a while.

  • -10

The catholic dogma was interpreted this way at the time of the Council of Florence (see also Dante), but it stopped to be long before Vatican II. For example:

To be in the communion of the Catholic Church and to be a member of the Church are two different things. They are in the communion of profession of her faith and participation of her sacraments, through the ministry and government of her lawful pastors. The members of the Catholic Church are all those who with a sincere heart seek the true religion and are in unfeigned disposition to embrace the truth wherever they find it. It never was our doctrine that salvation can be obtained only by the former.

John Carroll, first bishop of the US.

For the protestant, I don't get it. I was taught that they believe in fate, so that your salvation was decided by God before your birth and your actions don't matter, but I'm no expert.

I'm not sure you get it. I do not think the important part of it is about "making everybody else live according to my principle". Most people do not care that much about what others do. It's more that my freedom to live some kind of life enters in conflict with the freedom of someone else. For example, if someone wants to live without ever hearing "nigger", this person has to enforce a ban on the word. The person might not really care about what people do everywhere where they aren't, they just don't want to hear it. But the only reasonable way to enforce the "don't say nigger to me" rule is to find allies that do not want to hear it either and to ban it almost everywhere.

You may reply that it is not the same kind of freedom, as the freedom to say something is a freedom to act, while the freedom not to hear something is a freedom to a feeling or a non-feeling. But what about rape? The rapist is the actor, the victim is just feeling something. Or what about smoking in restaurants? A rape acts on the body of the unwilling victim, but so does the word "nigger" with the ears, and so does the smoke with the nose. Politics is often about finding practical compromises between opposed freedom.

If free speech is usually preferred to censorship, it is because without it, some truths cannot be said; that the government can start to live in a fantasy world where everything he does is wonderful. Such a government is obviously doomed. So it has been decided wisely that this should not happen. But it means that as long as every truth can still be said, there is no actual danger with censorship. A ban on the word "nigger" is not dangerous, as it does not change your ability to say any truth. I think that a ban that forbids the use of the word "nigger" as a quote of someone else's words is completely stupid, but it is not dangerous as long as there is some other way to speak, as ridiculous as it might be (like "n-word").

Then, there is the usual argument: if we ban "nigger", they will want us to reduce freedom of speech even further : this is the slippery slope fallacy. What about "if they can say nigger, they will soon try to kill black people"? History proves that limiting freedom of speech can lead to general censorship, but it also prove that racial insults can lead to mass murder. Is limited freedom of speech a worse result than a mass murder? Even if you think that a limited freedom of speech would eventually lead to mass murder, you have to agree that it works both ways: mass murder are a very good way to destroy freedom of speech.

In practice, neutrality would have meant that Ukraine will always remain weaker than Russia and can be invaded at any time. Russia would just have to wait for a time where NATO is occupied somewhere else. Russia violated the Budapest memorandum and the Minsk agreement. How could Ukraine trust them to not invade them?

Moreover, the fact that Ukraine is or is not in NATO is not very relevant for the security of Russia. They are American nukes in the baltic countries, so the threat would not be any bigger. On the other side, Russia would still have nukes, so the invasion risks aren't any higher. So if Ukraine joining NATO does not change anything for Russia security, you have to find another reason why it matters to them. The only thing Russia can do if Ukraine is "neutral" but not if it is in NATO is invading them.

has destroyed the country

No, the invasion has.

has cost enormous sums of money

The invasion has. The US are not responsible for it.

has wasted American influence in Ukraine

Are you kidding? American influence is stronger than ever in Ukraine.

has pressured Russia into developing better drone technology

No, their invasion has pressured them to do so.

has finalized the alienation of Russia from the West

Once again, it's their choice to invade Ukraine that has alienated them. Even after 2014 the west was totally OK negotiating with Russia. Have you heard about Nord Stream 2?

has influenced Arab nations into cozying with Russia

They always did... They are not democratic countries, they have an interest in helping authoritarian regimes. It has not much to do with Ukraine.

and all we get in return is some dead Russians

And the reassurance that you won't abandon your allies, which was in doubt after the Afghanistan retreat.

Well it was also the opinion of vatican II that everyone could be saved on his own merits, if they did not reject jesus. So it seems that you can actually reinterpret dogma, because that's what vatican II did. Just like the catholic church always had a dogma that you could not make money from money, yet there are catholic bankers now.

If society has to live a lie, it certainly is at a higher cost than if it is telling the truth. You cannot train everyone to lie everyday and expect no consequences. (1984 is often presented as a book about mass surveillance, it is actually about truth and lies. "Freedom is the freedom to say that two and two make four, everything else follows".)

So it seems that both questions (the truth of the gender theory and the damages to society) are related.

Personaly, I would comply with anyone's desire to be treated as a woman, a man or anything else. I don't see the point in bothering these people about their personal choices. But if someone asks me out of context, what I think about gender theory, it seems to me it is my duty to say that I don't believe in it (or at least in some of its main points).

And I have no problem with society enforcing more kindness toward trans people, but at some point there must be spaces where we forget any kindness requirements and look coldly at the truth.

It's called paradox of value, or water-diamond paradox (water is a lot more useful than diamonds, but the price of diamonds is higher).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_value

An angry Bob in middle America has no power to formulate plans for middle East invasions and then put them into action.

Democracy means that everyone is responsible for what happens. Especially everyone which was in favor of the choice that was made. Sure, a guy in middle America wouldn't have been able to change anything himself, but it would have made a huge difference if a lot of angry Bob in middle America had opposed the war, instead of being in favor of it. The jews weren't a majority of the Bush electorate, and it's pretty clear that the Bush electorate supported the war.

Many Americans wanted revenge for 9/11. The direction those emotions were guided in and the actions those emotions were used to justify were completely the work of neocons and zionists. To pretend those two movements are not extremely jewish goes beyond any reason.

People were angry. They wanted a war. So they are not completely innocent. Moreover, the problem of the war in Irak was more the war than the fact that it happened in Irak. All the other possible targets of the "revenge" were even worse: Pakistan has nukes, Saudi Arabia has oil. Other countries had no responsibilities in 9/11. They could have argued for peace, but you know very well that it wouldn't have worked. Some people have tried (some of them jewish), but they have never been heard. So the neocons provided you with what you wanted: the best (or the least bad) target they could find. That was not the main problem. The problem was that an angry mob was asking for blood. Being dumb and emotional is no excuse.

It depends how you define catholicism, but it seems to me that there is in practice only one type of catholicism. They recognize the same pope, they go to the same churches. That is why you can actually reinterpret dogmas, even if you said you couldn't. Because the dogmas are defined by the catholic community, not the other way.

There are "elections" in Russia one month from now. Elections are a dangerous time for the power in place, even in Russia, because people can choose this time to protest. Putin just wanted to make it clear that no opposition will be allowed.

The paradox of value is that things that are more useful than others as a whole, like water, have a lower price than other scarcer things like diamonds.

Replace water with cleaning ladies and diamonds with software engineers and you get exactly the same situation as above

Now Dmitri Markov is also dead. The probability thatthey weren't both directly murdered is now very low...

You are assuming that the only way the war might propagate to Iran is if Iran decides to. But Israel could very well decide that for them. Iran has been weakened by recent anti regime protests and Israel's government needs to prove they do something about the security of their citizen without hurting Hamas too much because Hamas has hostages. It's not the most plausible issue, but game-theoretically hurting Iran is somewhat sound, just like nuking Belarus as a retaliation against Russia (see The Bomb by Fred Kaplan)

The catholic community is the set of people that go the the same churches, that recognize the same pope, that have the same theology courses (be it catechism or university courses). Obviously you can ask whether south america catholics are really in the same community as rome catholics, but catholicism is heavily centralized and ultimately it's the pope who chooses the priests everywhere (through the bishops and the cardinals). If you recognize the priest the pope has chosen for you, you are a member of the community.

It allows reinterpretation because in practice it does not change the community to reinterpret. People won't leave the churches, they won't stop recognizing the priests. In fact, some might: some communities do not recognize vatican II, but they are very small minorities that do not matter much. Most catholics aren't theology nerds and the point of catholicism is that they don't have to. Knowing the dogmas and reading the bible is good for the priests, but the people just have to follow what the priests say. So why would they care if the dogmas change?

Now there is a shift, a formation of new nations. Modern France or England are already France and England only in the geographical sense. The brain is American; the body is gradually being mullattized (mixed marriages, mass immigration of Blacks and Arabs). As a result, new ethnicities are gradually emerging, with a new history, a new religion. Already this France resembles France of the 18th century only as much as the «Holy Roman Empire of the German nation» resembled the original Roman Empire.

This is bullshit. Whoever wrote this does not know France at all. Sure, we are closer to America now. Sure, we look less like 18th century France. But does America look like 18th century America? This argument is shitty. Modern France does not look like 18th century France because we have cars, planes, trains and computers. Nothing to do with America by itself.

The relationship to the economy and to the culture is not at all the same in France and in the US. It's not that French people oppose freedom to own weapons, it's that they do not even understand why anyone would not oppose it.

  • Currently, there is a strike in refineries that would have created an oil shortage if the government did not react by using strategical reserves. Can you imagine that in the US?

  • There is a national ban of headscarves (or actually any kind of religious or political symbols) at public schools in France. Can you imagine that in the US?

  • In the last presidential election, we got an actual socialist at 22% (the guy is anti NATO and thinks Taiwan should belong to the US). Macron got 28% and Le Pen 23%. Can you imagine that in the US?

  • Healthcare and retirement schemes are state-controlled. Can you imagine that in the US?

But the second situation is not even possible, you cannot have a factory without any workers...

Paradox of value is not a market, it's a phenomenon that can appear in any market: some things have a higher price than others that seem more necessary. It's something that must be explaned by the theory, and every economical theory (eg theory of labour value) has tried to explain it.

Supply and demand cruve intersecting is just a possible explanation of this phenomenon in marginal utility theory. Perhaps someone one day will come with a better theory and a better explanation, but as long as it is an economical theory it will have to provide an explanation for the paradox of value.

But belonging to a country is a matter of allegiance more than of ethnicity. Would you argue that someone who has never lived in France, doesn't speak french and hates France is actually french just because his biological parents are? And anyway the person is french if society declares her french ( e g with an id or a passport), not if she self identifies as a french person. She can self identify as much as she wants, it won't change anything. The same is true for parenthood : your are the parent of a child if he declares you as his parent, not if you self identify as his parent. It means society expects you to take care of the child. When we think about parent, we think about that more than about the sexual act to make the child.

Transgender identity, on the other side, is meaningless because when we think about women, we think about people with a vagina, two tits, a menstrual cycle, who experienced that from their young age and can bear children. Men are free to wear make up if they want, a lot of men have, it won't make them women. Thinking you can become a woman is like thinking you can become King Charles: either you are born the first son of Elisabeth, or you're not. There is nothing we can do about it, even if you self identify as Charles.

Yes he was a drug addict but he had been for years and he dies the same day as Navalny.

And now a pilot who defected to Ukraine and lived in Spain...

The question is not about the legitimacy of Israel. Israel was founded on blood like any other state in the world. Before that the territory was british, and before that it was ottoman (turkish) for centuries. So do you think Turkey was the legitimate owner of this territory? Anyway they didn't get it peacefully from the crusaders, who took it by force from the arabs. Those arabs took it by force from the byzantine empire. I don't think I need to continue.

Nowadays, Israel is a strong state and a nuclear power. Perhaps it has no right to exist but it will exist anyway. The earlier you accept it, the earlier a more acceptable solution than this awful status quo can be found.

For the record, I'm not really a christian, I'm just telling you how I understand it from (almost) outside.

If I cut your arm, what is "you" after the cut? Yourself, or your cut arm? I was made to chant "we are the body of the christ, each of us is a member of this body". It's pretty clear, isn't it?

The size of the party, or the pope, do not matter. What matters is that the community remains functional if you remove a part of it. Sure, it will be less functional if you split it in half or if the pope is heretic, because that would have important consequences on the functionality of the church.

As I said Christians say that they are concerned by truth, but it does not mean they actually are. Yes, the protestant churches are organized in such a way that communities split if they don't have the same faith. So perhaps the protestants are more concerned by the truth than the catholics. But it can't really work. There is no practical way to discover the truth, as proved by the number of protestant churches. You can say if you wish that god will lead you toward the truth, but then you have to explain why God leads so few people toward it, even among the protestant. Making religion about faith and truth is deemed to disolve it. Ultimately everyone will have his own beliefs and there will be no religion at all.

The catholic way, to stick together and let the hierarchy decide what must be believed seems a bit dishonest, but at least it's not provably false that God leads the Catholic church as a whole toward the truth. Sure, individual belivers might be false (perhaps even all of them), but at the end of the day the Church will remain and improve. And as catholics care more about charity than about faith, it's not even that important if it happens that they are mistaken for all of their life. Remember that charity is love, and love is what make people want to live together and seek unity.

But this is the same with the justice system then : you give people power to put others in prisons, but then it will be misused. It has been. Why is that that we should have total freedom of speech but not close the prisons? Censorship, like prisons, can be controlled by laws that define precisely when it is possible to censor and when it is not. After all, there are cases where we allow censorship (saying falsely that there is a bomb in an airport, death threats,...)

Same thing can be said eg about prisons. So you shouldn't have prisons...

Did you steelman the case for some censorship, though? What your teachers said seems to be a slippery slope fallacy. For exemple, "authauritarians will put people in prisons, and they will start with criminals, so we should have no prison at all".