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Can you defend how praciticing religion harder isn’t a solution to most societal ills?

Well it is make believe to start. How would you react to being asked why the 3 little pigs were a not solution to societal ills?

Also the countries that have tried that are all total shitholes. Been to a theocracy lately? Not great.

And the Deep South sucks ass. Alcoholism, teen pregnancy…

Correlation isn’t causation.

a higher fraction of socially conservative tradcaths.

I have been summoned.

I'd make the argument that there 3rd generation woke immigrants and 3rd generation far-right immigrants proof that Americanization still works, just not the same way it worked in 1959.

Basically every Muslim politician of note in the US is uniformly left-wing on social issues. Sounds like those people are assimilating into society just fine.

Deleted post, what happened here?

Because I don't really see "not talk about the ruling class" as an acceptable answer to that question

You could just be specific. I'm not suggesting you need a comprehensive list of every single person involved, but you should be able to provide some key identifiable institutions or people. It is extremely relevant who they are because you cannot possibly draw useful conclusions about them otherwise. A nebulous "they" has no interests.

These demands for specificity displace the object level debate into another debate about the true nature of the ruling class, in which dissidents usually disagree with each other, and thus serves the interests of the ruling class by keeping opponents divided. Since that rhetoric serves an interest, I find it suspect.

All rhetoric serves an interest. Vagueness makes it impossible to interrogate claims or simply obfuscate their absurdity. The motives of the "powers that be" to assassinate Trump are not something anyone can examine because there is no clear reference.

Of course, the real answer to all this is that the "ruling class" is a fiction - the people and organizations that wield power are fragmented and frequently at odds.

Looking at the AAQCs from August 2022, something like half of those people are still posting here regularly. It's largely the same people posting here now that were posting back then. So I'm not sure when you think the alleged golden age was, but apparently, it was more than two years ago. (Which means you're still posting on a forum that you think has been shit for 2+ years.)

Is there any good online poker (actual money or just fun money) left? Or is it all weird bots / scams?

I'd like to start playing mostly as a way to have some non-passive fun (I can't just do movies / shows / books every night).

Related; any good medium to advance "how to play poker" guides? I don't mean absolute beginner stuff, but anything that gets into deeper probability / behavioral theory. Think if Doyle Brunson wrote Super System but he was a MIT game theory PhD dropout first.

I'll have to read up on Gemayel.

As for Alexander II (I think you mean, though I just found out III was the object of an assassination attempt by Aleksandr Ulyanov, elder brother of the most famous Ulyanov), I'm on the fence. The assassin's ideological program seems consistent with Communist revolution: the long temporal gap, conservative reaction, and WW1 being the more immediate cause all point in the opposite direction. Maybe I'd land on a half point?

Court intrigues seem less like history and more like bookkeeping to me, though perhaps that's just distance and time obscuring the historical changes they caused.

Hunter-Gatherers and Play

A number of researchers have commented that hunter-gatherers, in general, are highly practical people, not much given to magic or superstition (e.g. Bird-David, 1992; Thomas, 2006). Shamanic healing might be seen as an exception, but such healing may actually work to the degree that diseases have psychological components. In general, hunter-gatherer religious ceremonies have more to do with embracing reality than with attempting to alter it. As an example, Thomas (2006) describes how the desert-dwelling /Gwi people use their rain dance not to bring on rain but to welcome it joyfully and partake in its power when they see it coming.

The sound of the molimo is deemed sacred, and women are supposed to be frightened of it and to believe that it comes from a terrible animal spirit. According to Turnbull, when he observed the ceremony, the women played their parts well, staying in their huts and acting frightened. But they were not really frightened; they seemed to know perfectly well that this was all a grand game instigated by the men. Other anthropologists have likewise contrasted the playful attitudes of hunter-gatherers toward their deities with the fearful attitudes of neighboring sedentary people (e.g. Endicott, 1979; Tsuru, 1988).

If we think of social life as a grand human game, then the religious beliefs of a society provide a context for understanding the goals and rules of the game and for making decisions. The religious beliefs both reflect and help to support the society's socioeconomic structure. From this point of view it is no surprise that monotheistic religions that blossomed in feudal times portray a hierarchical view of the cosmos, with an all powerful God, "king of kings," at the top, and a storyline focused on requirements of obedience and service to lords and masters. It is also no surprise that hunter-gatherer religions reflect an egalitarian view of the spirit world, populated by a multitude of deities, none of whom has authority over the others or over human beings.

The hunter-gatherer deities themselves are playful and even comical beings, not stern judges. Their interactions with people can most often be described as whimsical. A deity may hurt or help a person just because he or she feels like it, not because the person deserves it, and in that sense, at least, the deities are personifications of natural phenomena such as the weather. A common character in the hunter-gatherer spirit world is what mythologists call the "trickster" (Guenther, 1999).

I think it’s a distinction without much of a difference. Security in IOT is safety from crime and hacking and so on. The point being that because of the fact that people learned about those features and why they were important, people did due diligence on making sure that those features were in the cars they bought. Sure some poorer people had to do without airbags in the early 1990s, but that was a cost issue.

I still think that it’s better to educate and demand due filling simply because the law moves much too slowly to keep up with technology and even then people making the rules often have no idea what the dangers are or how the things being regulated actually work. Having an octogenarian who has trouble with emails try to anticipate the issues of an IOT camera in your kids bedroom isn’t going to work well. Teaching parents to make sure their devices have strong password protection, good encryption, and virus protection is easier and would keep up with the field.

I'm taking a more limited definition of assassination: an individual who attempts to change how he is governed by killing an individual or small group who govern him. I'd say this excludes a government killing domestic opponents (governments can kill on a much grander scale, since they are not the governed but the governors) and soldiers killing other soldiers (two governments sending their governed to kill each other to resolve a dispute).

Yeah I've been around this particular weird space since 2013ish so 2 years ain't a lot. The fact that I can see an admin amongst the posters from your example is not a point in the favor of this argument.

Even then people can and do learn. And I don’t see why people assume that computer and network issues are that much more complicated to learn than any other security or safety concerns for anything else you might do or use. People can be taught this stuff. We managed to learn electrical safety and gas safety and safe driving and thousands of other problems that came along with new technology.

I’m reading Hyperion right now. I find the first story — the priest who had to basically crucify himself to finally die — the kind of science fiction that makes me think a bit.

Oh. Don’t worry about it.

The cruciform story is so damn cool. But unsettling. But cool.

And the shrike…

I don't think Trump is Hitler. If he begins the deportation of American Jewry, I'd be surprised.

Biden strikes me more as Mr. Magoo than Mao or Stalin. Unless it's an act.

But manchin will probably not cooperate with replacing an assassinated justice

Sure he would. Why wouldn't he? And what choice would he have anyway?

I mean, you know who you replied to, right?

And I guess we lost a cath recently, maybe not so trad but certainly conservative. Hope she comes back.

The problem is the prosecutor will argue that it was blindingly obvious that (insert bunch of opaque regulations) said Trump had to record it as a campaign expense and not a business expense. The defense will argue that no, (insert different bunch of opaque regulations) said he should have recorded it as a business expense and not a campaign expense. The jury, not being experts on the ins and outs of New York business accounting, will not be able to come to a conclusion on the merits, so it'll just be a matter of who they believe. The prosecution certainly won't admit to any ambiguity.

If these mysterious powers that be really don't want Trump to be president to the point that they're willing to assassinate him, and we presume they have the ability to pull it off, why wait until he gets elected? Anyone even more odious than Trump is probably someone who has even less chance of getting elected — and none of the personality cult — than he does, so why not do it now? Especially since the security of a sitting president is almost certainly much tighter than whatever he's getting now. We've never had a major party candidate drop dead during an election season before, so it's uncharted territory how much of a shit show it could turn into trying to find another nominee on short notice. The veep is the obvious choice, but I'd be willing to bet that the actual primary candidates will feel like they deserve a shot since they actually got votes at the convention and Trump's pick was only for vice. Or hell, do it now while there are still primaries to go and Haley is still on the ballot. She may have a better shot of beating Biden in the general but four years of her are certainly better than four years of Trump. Why even give the guy a chance if you don't have to?

the people and organizations that wield power are fragmented and frequently at odds

This is entirely compatible with the concept of the ruling class and I should say necessary to understand the reasons of formation and collapse of the category. Everyone is indeed always at odds, a ruling class is a group of people that are sufficiently organized that their internal squabbles don't jeopardize domination of their external enemies.

Let us consider a salient and inarguable example of a ruling class, the Soviet nomenklatura.

No sane student of history would deny that these people had vicious internal fights, often to the death. But then nobody would deny either that they were a ruling class. They formed an organized minority of people who ruled over the majority of Soviet population.

Insofar as they were ready to favor their social circle over the population at large, they held power, and it slipped from their fingers at the precise exact time that their inner divisions became more powerful than the pact they held against the population. In the 1991 Yanayev coup, when fellow party members stopped being friends, and became enemies.

All rhetoric serves an interest.

In some abstract sense, perhaps. And everything is also political in that sense. But it dissolves the category into uselessness. Rather, as I think you're saying, refusing to front a list of names serves the interest of dissidents. Which is also suspect.

Fair enough, but I then don't think we ought to take sides if we want do do a descriptive inquiry. Talking about the ruling class, whatever it is, and the ruling class, a specific one; are both valid and useful in my view.

The motives of the "powers that be" to assassinate Trump are not something anyone can examine because there is no clear reference.

I guess we agree in the sense that we then ought to bring up different models of the establishment and its behavior, and compare them against the situation. I think that's productive and we should cultivate a number of such models if we want to understand the world as it is.

I simply want to prevent us from the demand of fronting a perfect prediction model for something that is desperately trying not to be observed.