domain:worksinprogress.co
georgioz
2m ago
It really strikes me just how possibly staggering these findings are, yet they're completely unknown by your average member of the public - at least one that isn't highly interested in archaeology or Egyptology.
I followed youtuber Metatron who spoke about that couple of months ago. As for "average member of public", they may be more aware than you think - except they maybe know more about it Ancient Aliens style.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
5m ago
Are you doing ok? I know we just had a long back-and-forth about the nature of God (except you might not agree with the word Nature, so just substitute what-God-is-ness.) And this is the "arguing about things politely" website. But I want to express to you how sad I was to hear the news, and how much I hope that LDS and Catholics can stand against desecration of safe and holy places.
There are some Protestants who do not consider Catholics to be Christians because we don't "Believe in the Gospel" which is reduced to Sola Fide. Who gets to be The Gatekeeper of what a Christian is? I don't know. I know you're not Catholic and I'm not LDS - that's something that we get to decide within our sects. But the term Christianity is so broad that no single group can claim the authority to gatekeep. If you consider yourself Christian, then that's good enough for me.
The Medievals believed Islam to be a Christian Heresy. If muslims count, LDS certainly does.
5434a
6m ago
Naming it Really Simple Syndication was a disaster by emphasising publishing instead of consuming. Meanwhile semi-nonsense names like Digg, Tumblr and D.e.Lic....iO.u..s ate its lunch.
If they'd just named it Really Simple Subscription instead...
Stellula
9m ago
What are the parts of Christianity that Mormons believe were missing for 1800 years?
Which differences would you accept as “yes these actually are the different beliefs we have”, that were so important that an angel had to come to upstate New York in the 1800s and reveal them to Joseph smith?
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
10m ago
At what level of non-functionality should people lose rights? Should they, if they've never done anything wrong, in spite of the non-functionality?
At what level of functionality should people be given rights in the first place?
At what level of functionality should something be registered as people?
Registering anything born by people as people, and then giving it adult rights as soon as it's been around for exactly 18 years is a bit of an oversimplification in the first place. Asking for a scrupulously well-designed threshold at which to remove rights seems like an isolated demand for rigor.
Which is to say - I shrug. There's no clean answer.
samiam
13m ago
As a classic liberal, any kind of intolerance with an outgroup is very offensive to me. The entire “are Mormons Christians” sub-thread here is an example of that: It’s trying to make an entire group of people an outgroup, just as the illiberal left is trying to demonize Charlie Kirk because he was a Christian.
It’s human nature to separate people into outgroups and ingroups, but it’s a very unhealthy kind of tribalism which separates us when we should be together. Countless people have died in religious wars because of that kind of outgroup-vs-ingroup thinking, and I for one do not want to see us go back to the intolerance of the middle ages. And, yes, when the illiberal Left has real power, their intolerance can be just as deadly, as seen in how they cheered on Kirk’s death, and how they enabled and maybe even supported open riots during the George Floyd protests.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
18m ago
Isn't the relevant question here whether the shooter considers Mormons Christians and attacked them as such?
It's sort of like the cases of Sikhs or Hindus getting the shit beat out of them by guys shouting about Muslim terrorism, that's still an anti-Muslim crime even if the victims aren't Muslims.
If the shooter intended to kill Christians, and perceived Mormons as indistinguishably Christian vis a vis Catholics or Evangelicals, then it was an anti-Christian attack.
birb_cromble
23m ago
Black bears will run away if you cough unexpectedly.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
26m ago
I recently had an experience with a regular at work that left me in a bit of a dilemma. It has some worthy CW meat to chew on, particularly in regard to some recent events, so I thought I'd share it here.
Let me tell you about Hassan.
Hassan is not his real name, though his real name is similarly classic Arabic. Hassan is an American black guy. Nothing he has said in the years I have known him implies Islamic faith, but the name suggests maybe his parents had interests in that direction. Hassan is tall, in quite good shape, and fairly handsome - a bit like a Temu Young Denzel. As I mentioned, he is a regular, and he seems to like me in particular, so I usually end up chatting with him for a while whenever he comes in. The last time I encountered Hassan he mentioned his desire to leave Jersey for the south (possibly the Carolinas), something he's mentioned on numerous prior occasions. He has issues with New Jersey that we'll get into later, and thinks the south would be a more welcoming environment. But this last time he added that if he were in the south, he could get a gun (he pantomimed a holstered pistol on his hip as he said this), so that he could "be a man" and "take care of business".
And the reason I found this concerning is that Hassan is a textbook paranoid schizophrenic.
The very first time I met Hassan he spent 15 minutes telling me that the government snuck into his apartment while he was out and planted listening devices in the walls. He frequently expresses concern that "they" are out to get him, a nebulous shadowy they who mess with his Social Security Disability payments, try to steal his money, try to lure him into doing bad things, sabotage his employment efforts, and try to take advantage of him sexually.
More on that last bit in a moment.
Talking to Hassan, all of this comes out in a non-stop stream of consciousness type exposition that has never even caught sight of a filter or a reality check. It's as though every thought that occurs to him is taken as literal Truth, and never subjected to any kind of, er, sanity checking.
That said, Hassan is actually quite functional. He lives by himself, handles his own bills and money, cooks for himself. These are accomplishments he is very proud of, that frequently come up during his expositions. He will start by telling me how the people at the Social Security office are stealing from him (AFAICT, that was either taxes or a garnishment of some sort), then veer into reciting all the vegetables he eats because he knows how to eat healthy, he cooks for himself, but these people they not eatin' right and it causes problems, mental problems in they head they be havin' mental problems because they don't eat right, not like him because he eats his green beans, real food that he cooks for himself because he knows how to eat right, act right because he learned it in school, third grade, food pyramid, he learned that here in Jersey in school, third grade, and these other people should have learned it but they not acting right, that’s just Jersey, lotta bad people in Jersey, obsessed with money, takin’ from you, takin’ your money.
Just imagine that sort of run-on sentence going on for 45 minutes.
"Acting rightly" is a very serious concern for Hassan. He is deeply worried about people plying him with drugs, or otherwise enticing him into criminal behavior. He recently managed to get a job at a bakery, but he noticed his boss was sniffling and rubbing at his nose, so Hassan flatly told the man to please not offer or force Hassan to do any coke.
He was fired shortly after for some reason. "They" struck again. Jersey, ammirite?
So, we have a man with an internal filter that is severely misfiring at best, with consistent delusions of enemies out to get him, telling me he wants to get a gun to "be a man" and "take care of business".
I consider myself to be a strong proponent of the Second Amendment, but that conversation made me consider the merits of having a chat with my local police department.
Awkwarrrrrrd.
As that thought occurred to me, it wasn't conceived as a hostile action. Five seconds before that moment I would have happily told you that Hassan was the very model of "Oh, yeah, he's crazy but he's harmless." As my brain first traced that hypothetical report, it was largely directed by concern for Hassan himself. He travels on foot throughout the county, often in bad neighborhoods, but that's always been the case. Has something changed? Is he being threatened? If I were to take that info to the police, it would be in the hopes that they would be forewarned, and able to help him.
And, contrary to popular belief, I honestly believe they'd try, because I've seen it before. Someone called the cops for a wellness check on Hassan, and they caught up to him when I was there. Three of them showed up, because this is a small, safe town with little for them to do, and they earnestly tried to just check and see if the man was alright.
Hassan responds poorly to wellness checks. On another occasion, Hassan was trekking around on a hot summer day, on foot and hauling his old lady luggage cart. A much more successful black man (judging by the car) paused to ask Hassan if he needed some water. Hassan yanked out his gallon jug of water from the luggage cart thing and shook it at the interloper, yelling "You need water?! You need water?! You need water?!" I had a young second-generation Hatian kid working for me at the time, and he thought it was the funniest fucking thing he'd ever seen. He was wandering around the place for weeks afterward, randomly muttering "You need water!" to himself and cracking up.
It was worse with the three cops. Hassan was yelling and agitated and scaring other customers, and I ended up sort of forcing myself into the situation and just aggressively treating him like a normal customer to keep him calm until the cops left (Hassan responds very well to being treated with normal, respectful courtesy. Imagine that.)
You might think it was so bad because of the obvious racial element of three white cops stopping an erratic black man and trying to grill him with questions, but it's actually because one of Hassan's persistent delusions is that The Police want to enter a homosexual relationship with him and he has no interest in doing so. It's not even like specific officers. Just "The Police" in general. All of them, I guess. Hell of a polycule. And it sounds funny, but it's probably actually very sad. Hassan has told me that his deceased father was a police officer, and the interest in a relationship from the cops came from when he was a young man. I suspect that the start of this was his dad's old buddies trying to watch out for the son, but their interest and attention being filtered through Hassan’s delusional paranoia.
Or maybe someone tried to molest him. I don't know, and I can't exactly take his interpretation at face value.
So the optimistic thought of the cops trying to help Hassan while being mindful that he may be armed lasted until the instant it occurred to me that they might try to frisk him, because that could well end in Gay Panic Tragedy.
But really, what right do I have to red flag the man? He has never done anything wrong that I've ever seen. Hassan would walk ten miles out of his way to avoid the appearance of having accidentally stolen a quarter. He might honestly be the most scrupulous person I've ever met - and if part of that is fueled by paranoid delusions, then his paranoia is remarkably pro-social and it might be that this world could do with more of it. By what right should a man that is pathologically righteous be stripped of the right to self-defense?
Well, because his IFF functionality is broken. Because his current modes of behavior may be "pro-social" because his only move when he encounters anything that strikes him as sketchy is to leave. But it's not like the man is powerless now. He's above average in height, and fit enough that I assume he's still doing Presidential Physical Fitness Testing daily, just like he was taught in third grade. If he was inclined to strike at perceived enemies, he could certainly do so by hand. A gun expands effectiveness, it won't add intent where none existed before.
Unless it puts the idea in his head. He's been paranoid and talking about moving to the south for years. Why the gun, why now? Was it a random conversation? Was it the violence on the news, in the air? Hassan strikes me as too focused on daily life for that. It takes nearly 100% of his mental bandwidth to get through his day to day. But I only see slices of his life. If a 3rd grade teacher told him that good citizens watch the news, how susceptible to social contagion would he be?
The final thing that dissuades me from taking a stroll to the station is the fact that we live in New Jersey. Hassan is never going to buy an illegal gun - in the tiny chance that some ne'er-do-well offers him a sale, he would assume he was being set up, freak out, and flee. And if the state that requires fingerprinting and a background check and two character references and a psych history and a sign-off by the local PD and assorted other rules so strict they won't let TheNybber buy a gun... well, if they give Hassan a Firearms Purchaser Card to buy a gun with his Permanent Disability For Psychological Issues money then we have much more general problems. And it's not like a warning like that would carry across state lines, even if the Free Carolinas would take a warning from the People's Republic of Jersey in the first place.
So I'm 99% sure it's a totally moot point. But it raises interesting questions. At what level of non-functionality should people lose rights? Should they, if they've never done anything wrong, in spite of the non-functionality? When I look at things like mass shooters, I will decry playing the partisan blame game when I think the person's thought process is sufficiently disordered - roughly at the level of "GPT2 playing madlibs". Is that a level that justifies preemptive action? If no, does such a level exist at all? If yes, where is the line?
The recent boat guy with the bullet in his brain who thought the "LGBTQ white supremacist pedophiles" were trying to kill him for narrowly avoiding their previous assassination attempts? That dude seems like he might just be broken hardware in a way where blaming any kind of software is just irrelevant. But before the attack he was just filing unhinged lawsuits and expressing wild conspiracy theories (unless there is an LGBTQ white supremacist pedophile cabal, in which case we again have much bigger problems). Is that something a man should have his rights stripped for? If so, is that meaningfully different from believing that, say, the police kill 10,000 unarmed black men per year? Or that Obama is a gay Kenyan married to Big Mike? Even broaching the topic feels wildly ripe for abuse.
Is this whole topic a can of worms best left unopened?
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
39m ago
Thanks for the catch. I have a habit of rewriting comments I'm not happy with, and apparently I fat fingered it.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
43m ago
It's not even that he's an atheist. I doubt he stakes such a claim, even in his heart. Rather, he's irreligious in an old school way that still has quite a bit of generic respect for religion and Christianity in particular. Like someone said earlier about the early season Simpsons going to church out of sheer inertia, Trump comes from a cultural environment where "The Good News/Book" still carries weight, even if you don't take it too seriously in your personal life.
tl;dr: Trump isn't Hitchens, he's Sky Masterson.
DelendaEst
46m ago
I feel like that is deeply uncharitable, and reads like deflection. Lefties claiming Robinson is unable to be coded because despite everything we know about him personally his parents are conservatives is moronic. But a villian accusation for gay white supremacists is literally cross pressured, though to be honest I personally think it is 85%+ left coded and saying it is too muddled to call is me being charitable.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
49m ago
Fascinating. Thanks for posting this.
Do you think the Egyptians are trying to keep this buried in order to protect the world from a cursed undead Mummy?
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
50m ago
This is true to an extent, but you've already got the vocabulary to get started. Basic things like sweet, sour, chocolate, fruity, spicy, nutty, earthy, and even smoky will probably be noticeable to you right away. As you get into the taste of your coffee, you'll notice more and more details, and be able to get more specific. Tart and sour resolves to something citrus-y. That nutty flavor tastes a little like pecan. That one sip reminds you of a nibble of really dark chocolate as the bitterness fades and the chocolate really opens up in your palate. And doggone if that one doesn't taste like black tea or green tea here and there. I've uploaded a coffee wheel image for your reference.
More than the caffeine, this is the hook that coffee set for me. I don't always get every flavor advertised in the particular bean but it's there so consistently that I'm confident that the flavor is there as long as I roast it right, which of course is half the fun, except when I'm consistently getting savory out of my beans. That means that it's time for me to clean my roaster!
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
51m ago
but the other sacraments (including Mass) are necessary for almost everyone and do require sacramentally ordained ministers in apostolic succession.
The Catholic view leans more towards, "God is not limited by His sacraments, but this is the only sure way He taught us." Meaning it's possible others are saved through the Church without knowing they are connected with the Church, like Abraham was. But the Church isn't going to change what it's doing, because this is the only sure way they know of.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1hr ago
The urbanite’s favorite social leisure activity is trying a new restaurant. They make plans in advance around it, it’s where they sustain their friendships, it’s where they experience novelty without drugs, it’s a whole big thing. There aren’t that many novel spaces that you can relax in which aren’t a restaurant in a city.
Humans also just naturally become addicted to new food and clothes, because they experience these every day. You see corrections against this in the Bible for this reason: “is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?”, and “for the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking but of righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit”. But where will an irreligious progressive hear a correction against becoming addicted to novel food, unless they’re into stoicism and mindfulness?
Celestial-body-NOS
Supra tumulum tuum, astra nobis.
1hr ago
religions that have nothing to do with Jesus whatsoever: Hinduism
Ackchyually, some Hindus consider Jesus to have been an avatar of Vishnu.
There are a lot of reasons why Muslims have a lower chance of assimilation: the religion allows for shame and correction and ostracization; they emphasize ritual purity, and every religion that does this has a stricter in/out group preference, eg gypsies and Haredim, because it conditions the mind to see others as unclean; they are inherently Arab and Arabized, because the whole religion is in Arabic and all prayers and all major commentaries, and the translations are not considered inspired, and all the centers of theology are in Arab countries, so there’s a constant pressure toward exclusion; Muslim countries want to sustain a strong Islamic in-group preference for biological and political reasons, which will always be stronger than Catholicism’s reasons of piety, and they are definitely finding ways to transfer large sums specifically for this reason; the story underlying Muhammad and the Quran is one of fierce exclusion and struggle, as opposed to the Christian story where the early Christians mingle freely; Islam has an entire corpus dedicated to how you present yourself publicly, so once your town or city becomes majority Muslim there’s now peer pressure for how you dress etc; Catholicism is frankly just a weekend lecture and nothing more for the vast majority of Catholics; Catholics were assimilating into a dominant culture that is, compared against Islam, 99.99% similar in all the important beliefs; the most extreme Catholics become priests and have a TFR of 0, while the most extreme Muslims become Imams and have a TFR of 3+
These are very basic things that a commentator should know. “Muslims will assimilate because Catholics did” is a really terrible take because it just ignores all the unique factors in both religions.
HereAndGone
1hr ago
It reminded me so strongly of Belloc's riff on The Nordic Man that I had to quote it.
Now, he may be playing us all for fools and in the last instalment he'll reveal all - "what, you thought I was serious? and you guys think you are so smart?"
I hope so. I would rather be thought a fool than a knave.
quiet_NaN
1hr ago
So Mormons can (politically) pass as Christians and self-identify as Christians, but theologically were assigned non-Christian at birth? Good thing we do not have separate bathrooms for Christians, then.
OliveTapenade
1hr ago
I am trying to be nice here, and I genuinely do appreciate this guy's level of politeness when dealing with hostile comments. He always thanks and compliments commenters, and that's worth something. That said, I did accuse him of writing "a variant on the Gobineau/Grant Nordicist theory", and from what I've seen since then, I think that holds up. This reads to me like a 21st century update of The Passing of the Great Race. Is there a brilliantly clever twist lurking in the background somewhere? All I'll say right now is that it doesn't look like it to me.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1hr ago
I'm not sure you can code that left or right at all
It's amazing how this tranfers from one side of the culture war to the other as the natural excuse for an accusation.
2rafa
1hr ago
I agree. There aren’t many Mormons in NYC (actually I grew up with a few and they have quite a strong network in finance, but the absolute number is low) and I highly doubt Trump is aware of Mormon theology or any differences with mainstream Christianity, and if he was he wouldn’t care. Mormons tell outsiders they are Christians (this is a big part of their missionary strategy) and they believe they are Christians, so why wouldn’t Trump take them at their word? Even many lay American non-Mormon Christians see them as Weird Christians, just like they do Jehovah’s Witnesses or Mennonites whatever.
Brilliant. I am now a professor of every Oxford and Cambridge college, holding a degree for every subject on Earth. I also have full security clearance for every military on Earth.
For practical purposes, you do sometimes have to distinguish between who is rightfully in a group and who is not. You do sometimes have to distinguish between ‘us’ and ‘not us’, and even ‘thinks they are us but they aren’t’.
While I have no strong feelings about Mormonism in any particular direction, and generally approve of some fuzziness here, to say that it doesn’t matter who is a real Christian and who has the sacred right to perform important rituals is to make these things meaningless.
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