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At this point, it's safe to automatically assume that any poster on the internet who unironically uses the phrase "Anglo-Saxon" to describe anything connected to present-day US foreign policy is a foreign bot.
You came uncomfortably close.
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@ADreamOfLiberty
Let me stop you right there, what are the full implications of sexual acts between a human and a non-human?
First, it can elicit incredible feelings of disgust. Most intelligent life forms will take the sexual anatomy of another species to be disgusting. Before engaging in such an act, even an initially mutual one, no animal can understand what they're signing up for. And if they're mentally developed enough to have a self-image, that image can be disrupted by internalizing feelings of disgust.
This can cause psychological issues that human experts are unable to account for, since psychology is still "primitive" in that it only lends understanding to the human mind.
Second, the mismatch in size between human and animal anatomy can cause physical damage to one party. From graphic accounts that I've heard, young children who were, depending on gender, *n*lly or v*g*n*lly penetrated suffered non-negligible tissue damage given the comparably great endowment of the other person. And when done to babies, they died shortly afterward. I imagine the same applies to a dog, or especially to anything smaller than a dog, or even to some smaller breeds of dog.
There's simply no way to communicate this risk to an animal.
Third, the mismatch in strength between human and animal parties. Rape is commonplace in the animal kingdom, and so far as I can tell, female animals are accustomed to accept the circumstances and not resist once the act has proceeded to a certain stage. Therefore, the mere fact that the animal doesn't seem to resist isn't proof of consent, assuming that the human initiated.
Even if the animal does somewhat consent, if the human party is dramatically stronger then that can make the experience traumatic. There's no way to account for this possibility.
It was actually on DDO that I realized that is false. It is obvious in retrospect. A 13 year old boy can be horny, and they can do calculus (well some of them can). Informed consent arguments fail completely.
Calculus is one measure of proficiency, or even a proxy for measuring intelligence, sure. But there multiple kinds of "intelligence", including emotional intelligence and simple life experience.
Quite simply, adolescent children might end up having sex with strangers who, if they were adults, they wouldn't agree to have sex with. They're not well grounded enough to avoid being manipulated into doing something that they'll regret, since people do in fact regret having sex with the wrong people.
It is the complexity of the human mind that makes it more vulnerable and the fact that it is not fully developed that allows an adult human to look back at the age of 13 and say "I wasn't ready to make that decision and everyone should have known it".
I think I understand the argument you're making here. No right to abstain from making a decision until a future point when they're able to exercise the highest potential of informed-ness is denied because the animal's incapable of ever reaching said point. And the solution is not to deny the animal's capacity to have sex altogether, as we accept that they do among their own kind.
Nonetheless, I'd like you to address the three hazards I listed above.
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(Ah dude I remember you. It's been like 6 or 7 years since you dropped off the radar from DDO and when you joined this site you picked the exact same username? Anyways, welcome back I guess.)
While it's true that animals have sexual drives like humans do (though generally with different triggers), they lack adult human intelligence, the adult human grasp of the full implications of sexual acts, and the adult human ability to take full agency over the question of when they ought to be having sex and with whom. This is why it's not acceptable to, say, have sex with a horny 13 year old boy.
In other words, consent isn't just mutual desire to have sex but mutually informed sex, or at least reasonable ability on both sides to become informed.
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@triangle.128k
That I did. And so long as they are the ones defending their country against Russia, I'll do it again.
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@Yassine
Call this the argument from firsts.
If you read J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, with knowledge that this was published in 1997 and preceded by virtually nothing similar to it, you would have to admire it.
But if you read a children's book called Johnny O'Donald and the Magic Academy, published in 2018, you would quickly recognize that it wasn't so groundbreaking. The author clearly built upon an existing work, its ideas, its tropes, and its conventions.
Mind you, in this example we're talking a gap of 21 years. Try a minimum of 500 years, if not 1,500.
You believe your religion's holy book to be a miracle in itself, by virtue of its impressive literary qualities. However, the Arabian landscape from whence it came had the long ago imported Christianity and Judaism. Whether Muhammad was literate or not, he was clearly exposed to the ideas inherent therein or otherwise found in the common discourse of Christians and Jews of that time.
Which is to say that he had the benefit of building upon previous material.
That previous material, the Bible, was the first. And it largely emerged from a vacuum, having built upon nothing. The Torah was a great work of literature, filled with original themes and stories expressed in remarkable detail. It's recited today by Jews as a work of poetic prose, written in a script arguably as beautiful as that used in Classical Arabic.
It is as much a literary miracle as what you believe in, but its authors did it first and in such a way as to call its origin totally spontaneous. Granted, this argument will not work on non-believers, but an intellectually honest Muslim will stop and reflect on it.
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In 2018, Russia had 353 abortions per 1,000 live births, higher than any country in Europe that wasn't formerly part of the Warsaw Pact. Less than 10% of the population attends church weekly, meaning its lavish houses of worship are next to empty on Sunday mornings.
The Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople (quite literally what the Orthodox mean by "Second Rome") has condemned Russian aggression and recognized the independence of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. The Romanian, Georgian, and Greek Orthodox Churches have also denounced Putin's invasion, suggesting about half of Orthodoxy outside of Russia does so.
The ROC puts icons inside its churches to Iosef Stalin, the man who almost singlehandedly gutted the Orthodox Church in Russia and across Eastern Europe. The brand-new Cathedral of the Armed Forces very nearly did as well. Their common choice of aesthetic is a mockery, if not a blasphemy.
Some "Third Rome" they are, lol.
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@triangle.128k
At this point, 9-10 days into the brutal attack on Ukrainian soil, the men of the Azov Battalion are unironically heroes. They're defending their country from a foreign invasion and that's more important than what symbols they choose to sport on their uniforms.
Granted, they're an exceedingly tiny share of the Ukrainian army and don't stand out in this climate of general heroism.
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Great idea y'all.
Because nothing would be greater than for the Non-Proliferation Treaty to dissolve under the weight of its own sheer irrelevancy as Russia gives nukes to Venezuela, Iran, Syria, Belarus, etc.
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@3RU7AL
The Quoran user "Misha Firer" is a Russian man and I recommend that people who want to learn more about the realities of Russia check him out.
He gave us a harrowing firsthand account of the streets of Russia on the day of the invasion. The way he described it, people did not want to look each other in the eye because that feeling of mutual shame was so strong.
They would like to hold their government accountable too. But they can't, meaning a strong and unified foreign response to Putin's actions is the best they can hope for.
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By complete chance I encountered Ragnar_Rahl on Quora.
While I wasn't around during his DDO heyday, his profiles on both websites are remarkably similar in content despite one having been updated considerably more recent than the other. Which is to say that he doesn't seem to have changed much over time.
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With one metaphorical stroke of a pen, Putin has killed whatever "We're an anti-imperialist power opposed to American unilateral bullying" propaganda value Russia enjoyed the last 20 years since Iraq.
The brief era of faux moral superiority by Eurasian autocrats has come to a decisive close. Their most ardent supporters now must admit Russia is just as bad as the US.
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@sadolite
He's still relevant? Or have you been watching his old videos?
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@RationalMadman
In a hyper-individualist country, a person is not responsible for what other people do. (Unless maybe it's your child or something but whatever.)
If we think of ownership as a right, misuse only calls into question the ownership rights of those personally guilty of misuse. In that sense, 10,000 Rittenhouse-style shootings will not affect the ownership rights of somebody who's never shot someone else. It's not a question of numbers or statistics. An innocent individual is the only number and the only statistic that matters here.
This is also a country whose strongest tradition is self-advocacy.
In other countries, for example, there is a single judge who hears evidence from a state-appointed prosecutor, and then makes a verdict. You might have somebody appointed by the state who defends you, but if the case looks bad then they might concede or actively work with the prosecution against you. In the US, you can hire a lawyer who will unconditionally represent you short of perjuring himself. He will pull all stops on your behalf even if the judge or jury personally thinks it's distasteful. There may be an objectively "wrong side" but that wrong side still has the right to do everything it can to win.
A gun is an extension of self-advocacy. In other countries, if you're being beaten up or raped and you can't fight back, the state would advise you to flee and seek justice later. If you can't flee, then you pretty much have to lie there and take it, and wait either for somebody to come along and help or for your assailant to later be taken to court after they've had their way with you.
In the US, you can decide that your right to bodily integrity is unconditional. That means killing someone else in self-defense, even if only to save yourself from one punch to the face that you didn't deserve to receive.
The question is whether that obligates you to take reasonable steps to flee first before resorting to violence. Some states have so-called "stand your ground laws", which say you don't have to. In other states, you could be charged with manslaughter or homicide.
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I've learned my lesson by now. It's not physically possible to predict a presidential election three entire years before it happens.
Anything could happen. So long as they were born a US citizen, anyone could run and win.
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What I think people are missing is this:
In recent years, there have been reports of individuals who were deemed "far right" being literally chased out of a town or city by an angry mob. Granted, maybe some of these people were in fact extremists, but their right to be in a public space while making political speech/expression should not have been contingent on their political ideology, no matter how personally distasteful to a majority or vocal minority of the population.
When these people were were "chased out of town", the media took a celebratory stance, gloating that they got their comeuppance at the hands of supposedly brave civic activists and relishing in their supposed cowardice for not standing their ground when vastly, vastly outnumbered.
This is a kind of extreme heckler's veto: shutting down people's natural rights in certain contexts through violence or implied threat of violence. And the left has not disavowed this practice so long as those being chased were on the right.
The left-leaning residents of Kenosha saw that Kyle Rittenhouse, whatever his origin or home address, disagreed with them. They fell back on an old familiar tactic but this once it backfired spectacularly.
I hope that an acquittal for homicide charges will serve to discipline and correct the American left by reminding them that denying the natural rights of disliked individuals through violence has consequences. Namely, if the police will not protect them, they might protect themselves by gunning down said mob. And under these limited circumstances (self-defense), them opening fire on other people demonstrably won't ruin their lives, meaning they'll be bold enough to disperse or deter an angry mob/assailant through force. Lethal force if necessary.
In other words, violence is a two-way street and poses no real advantage to any side, as anything you do to them today can be done to you tomorrow. To avoid it, you must respect that people you disagree with have and fully deserve the right to occupy the same public space as you.
Similarly, I hope that hardcore conservatives don't take any bad lessons from this. Rittenhouse is not to be emulated, for the simple reason that his circumstances must not be deliberately recreated.
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@RationalMadman
Are you vaccinated (or getting vaccinated very soon, no need to specify which), whether you are or aren't please state why (if it's a 'no' due to rare immunodeficiency disease you don't need to specify which just say health-related)?
Yes. I was vaccinated this April and May.
Which vaccine, why that vaccine?
Moderna. It was widely accessible and had a very high reported effectiveness rate. I was confident also that I could show up on time for both scheduled doses (my workplace even gave me some days off to get it done), so it was a good fit for me.
Do you support vaccine mandates?
I can't answer that question decisively. There's no doubt that, in this case, a vaccine mandate would be the best call. And in an age of increasingly sophisticated biological warfare, future pathogens might be too dangerous to give the public the luxury of a choice or even hesitation.
But if we take this step, then in theory the government could mandate any alteration to the body of any individual in the future. That's a scary prospect for sure.
The Christian religion (the Evangelical interpretation thereof, anyways) teaches that in the future, a governmental body will mandate some bodily alteration that, if taken, will damn the soul eternally. While a Covid vaccine obviously isn't that, a general environment where debate is closed on this matter and where dissent is vilified or criminalized is terrifying.
Do you believe Covid is a left-wing conspiracy?
No. I have ample reason to believe that Covid was a natural disaster, though perhaps one exacerbated by modern conditions and technologies.
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Didn't an actual lynch mob chase after him leading up to him discharging his weapon?
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If you type in "Iraq" on Google right now, you'll find reports of an assassination attempt against the country's Prime Minister, Mustafa Al-Kadhimi. The attack was perpetrated by the Iran-backed militias using a bomb attached to a drone that targeted his home in the capital.
It's clear that the militias, at one time apparent national heroes who led the campaign to retake northern Iraq from ISIS a couple of years ago, have since emerged as the greatest threat to Iraqi national security. Having failed in the 2021 parliamentary elections, they've now resorted to violence in the name of installing a foreign country as master over Iraqis.
What do you think the short and long term consequences of this development will be? What action, if any, do you think the Biden Administration should take in response?
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The "how" is easy:
You get a minimum of five Supreme Court justices to go along with it. We can safely assume Roberts would swing left on this issue, so it really boils down to Kavanaugh. During his confirmation hearings certain swing vote Senators had apparently been assured that he was a candidate who wouldn't repeal Roe v. Wade.
Some observers fear that Griswold's right to privacy might be overturned in the process. In practice, however, the Courts have independently sculpted a corpus of privacy law based off the 4th Amendment which is no longer grafted to property rights as it used to be.
That right is not unlimited; a "reasonable expectation of privacy" exists in some times, places, and contexts but not others. But this means is that it's not an all-or-nothing deal. The extension of "privacy" to mean legal abortion on demand could be gutted while leaving privacy intact in 99.99% of other contexts.
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There are a LOT of wumaos on Quora. It's like its very own pro-CPC spin zone.
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Yeah, I heard about that a couple of days/weeks ago. Horrifying stuff.
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Political Islam in Turkey means promoting active practice of the religion the vast majority of its people nominally believe in. I don't know how secular Turkey is in fact, but assuming it's going the way of Europe I can't oppose their efforts to save their country's faith.
The fact that the Hagia Sophia used to be a church isn't very important nowadays, especially since it was a secular museum prior to this change. This shouldn't be seen as an anti-Christian move and Turkey doesn't really have a sizable Christian minority to persecute anyway (most were genocided or expelled in the 1910s and 1920s).
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So far as I can tell, the past 3 years have constituted the use of a new tactic: an absolutely unbreakable wall of oligarch consensus about how unprecedentedly bad and "dangerous" the new administration is, with a barrage of surrounding literature and "reports" that, at this time, in the heat of the moment, with the vast bulk of fact-finding organized resources in the hands of those very same people, it's impossible to know whether most of them are true, fabricated, or exaggerated.
This could all be one extremely elaborate ruse. Since that's possible, its sheer elaboracy does not afford it the right to be taken at face value. If it is a tactic, then what works against Trump will work against literally any future president who the oligarchs want out of power, or presidential candidate who they don't want elected.
In other words, the current situation is probably without parallel. If Trump loses, there's the possibility that it happened because a few elites made enough noise to sway the masses. In that event, the American citizenry's free will is forfeit. They simply vote per the intents of the loudest noisemakers, who have the most money and influence.
Trump himself has done what all presidents before him have done: attempt to consolidate authority in his own executive. He has been remarkably ineffective in this regard, having been repeatedly defeated in his various efforts and often being without the backing of even his own party. This makes his remarkably undangerous. The stakes to American democracy from the fact of him getting reelected are not very high and in fact the longer he's in power the more political authority might be decentralized (whether he likes it or not). It must be proven in 2020 that the American people could re-elect Donald Trump in spite of paid noise demanding that they not. The only way to prove that is to do it. If as an experiment it's demonstrated once, I likely won't be as concerned in the future.
It's almost unfeasible that the next Republican will be another Trump. His campaign was driven by a unique charisma, and posers won't be taken seriously. Assuming his re-election in November, his successor in 2024 will certainly be Mike Pence, an establishment Republican. Even many of his supporters are tired of Trump's often unprofessional airs and would welcome an establishment Republican so long as they weren't a complete ideological sell-out.
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Not sure if I agree at all with the sentiment he was trying to express but thank you Oromagi for pasting the full speech.
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Not a bad choice. A slightly populist Democrat but it's not like Biden nominated Rachel Dolezal or Rev. Al Sharpton.
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@Lunatic
Mikal still does regular hangouts on DDO?
After all this time, still?
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@n8nrgmi
It'd have to be some kind of communal ownership of a few devices, with a few elected representatives being entrusted with their use. But in practice how is this different from simply having a (greatly de-centralized) military?
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@RationalMadman
Reagan was no friend of Gaddhafi. The latter sponsored some acts of terrorism in the West and pursued nuclear weapons. Reagan bombed him at least once, and his successors may've kept up sanctions against the rogue Libya.
Around 2002/2003 Libya agreed to scrap its nuclear program. Assuming we take these people at face value (like a lot of people assume Iran has kept its end of the Iran Deal), there was no reason to destabilize Libya in 2011. Obama saw very well how Iraq turned out but he still apparently thought it was a good idea to sponsor a civil war in the country and bomb Gaddhafi's forces from the air.
(Also, so far as I know of Gaddhafi wasn't a mass genocidal maniac on the level of Saddam, though of course he was still a dictator.)
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@RationalMadman
"Making countries dislike America" is a virtually meaningless statement. There's always going to be something about America that other countries dislike, so long as it's the main superpower. Cooperation with it, along with competition against it, are both inevitable. Neither Obama nor Trump really changed that.
When Obama was in office the EU and other countries maintained tariffs against American goods, even though he was a "friendly" President. If friendship means applauding and cheering for Obama while privately crapping all over America and its national interests then maybe America isn't interested in that kind of relationship.
Besides, what has Trump really done? Tweeted mean stuff? How many countries has he invaded? By the end of their first terms, most presidents since Reagan have invaded at least one country (Clinton invaded Haiti in 1994). Trump? None. Zilch. Nada. Obama's the one other exception, and his administration arguably worked behind the scenes to destabilize Libya, Syria, etc, throwing these countries into permanent states of civil war. Do you know how many countries international law allows you to invade? ZERO.
So does Trump have some magic ethereal quality about him that makes him more despised than the American presidents who actually invaded other countries? Or is it a bunch of rhetorical nonsense spouted by Trump haters? Because the latter seems more likely.
Do you know what makes a country disliked? Acting in imperialist fashion, annexing or dismantling other countries, disrupting international peace, laying territorial claims to its neighbors. Tell me how many wars Trump started, or how much territory, land or maritime, has been added to the United States since 2017.
And you know what? Even if Trump's not very nice, China's doing or planning on doing virtually all of the above. At the end of the day fear of China will outweigh most countries' disdain for Trump, a temporary 4-8 year president. Any country that thinks or acts differently is too stupid to live and deserves to become China's b**ch.
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The man was a geopolitically savvy leader. He aggressively pursued America's interests in ways that his predecessors largely declined. He sought to dismantle trade barriers that weakened the American economy's international competitiveness. He sought to bring back the era of plentiful good-paying blue collar manufacturing jobs, toward which end he rolled back many environmental regulations that incentivized offshoring to avoid compliance costs. He sought to re-assert American control over the domestic supply chains for steel, rare earth metals and petroleum. He sought to save trillions stolen from our economy every year via foreign IP theft.
And make no mistake, "the economy" is not some lofty abstraction. People's jobs depend on it. Their life savings invested in the stock market depend on it. Their retirements depend on it. A good economy is good for everyone. As of late 2019 the economy was at its best since the start of the Great Recession, and had seen improvement overall since the end of Obama's second term.
Unlike the establishment, which for idiotic (cough *partisan* cough) reasons sees Russia as America's primary threat even though it's a backward declining nation, Trump recognized China and Europe as our main competitors. He sought to use Brexit to drive a wedge in the EU while he escalated the pivot to Asia. His administration seems to be more aggressively pro-Taiwan than its predecessors and has stepped up warship transits through the Taiwan strait. He's resisted establishment pressure to tie down our forces in Eastern Europe, and is disengaging us currently from Afghanistan, both of which will allow for a speedier response to a Chinese crisis.
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But he botched Covid. Nobody's going to remember any of the above now, because it arguably pales in comparison to the magnitude of that blunder.
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@PGA2.0
I did not say God was corrupt. I was responding to a person who asked me to suppose for a minute that God might be corrupt. In that event, he asserted, would following this God make things worse for you?
My answer was no because this God would still hold all the power anyway and could torment anybody He wanted, whether they were His followers or not. Since people generally like being flattered and worshiped, it seems most evident that a corrupt God would be less likely to torment those who did so and more likely to punish stubborn holdouts who refused.
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@silwow
Whether or not God's corrupt, you couldn't do anything about it. Whether you chose to put your trust in Him or not, you'd still be at His mercy once you died. He could still do to you however He wished. But at the very least you'd have better chances of a good outcome if you stayed on His good side, right?
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@WaterPhoenix
It's worth a watch, assuming you're not completely burnt out on the "high school rom-com" premise. S1 had a catchy opening and the cast was generally distinctive. Yuuta stood up for himself and wasn't afraid to tell Rikka to bugger off, which to me was a nice change from the typical pushover MC. Like many anime it's not very long but it at least had two seasons, a movie and an abnormally large volume of OVA material so it outperformed much of its competition.
(Also, I was surprised after the fact by how much of the cast was AO. The manga must've been comparably lonely.)
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As I presently don't have a MAL account, my (updated fairly regularly) list can be reviewed here:
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Coronavirus infections are going up, BUT at the same time the death rate is going down. On July the 6th fewer than 1/11th as many Americans died as on the single peak day, May the 6th. From June the 20th (counting that day, a period of about 17 days ) until the time of posting the number of deaths was about 8200. In comparison, this number was well-surpassed in a mere 4 days from May 5-8. This is in spite a far higher total number of cases now.
This is for two reasons:
First, vulnerable populations (re: the elderly) are better insulated from infection now than they were 3 months ago. Of corona deaths so far I think maybe 2.5% were people under 45, but new infections are skewing younger.
Second, we're simply doing a better job of keeping people alive. The Trump administration enabled the stockpiling of both HCQ (which per a recent study might actually be useful in saving lives after all) ALONG WITH the more generally accepted remdesivir. Doctors are probably more experienced now also in handling coronavirus patients and I would assume there are fewer shortages for things like ventilators now.
Contrary to misconception, despite Trump denouncing widespread testing for self-motivated reasons the drop in reported deaths is actually not due to that. As of about 3 days ago the New York Times reported that the US performs about 600,000 tests a day, which is 5-6 times higher than a couple of months ago.
Over 130,000 have died but it wouldn't be fair to characterize us as "losing" against the virus either. Good news is legitimately beginning to emerge from this health crisis but there's a general reluctance to give airtime to such.
This is because there is, and presumably always has been within living memory, a "failed America" bias among narrative disseminating organs, where social and public ills that exist in the United States are given disproportionate attention compared to problems of a similar magnitude that exist elsewhere in the First World.
For example, Belgium has a population of about 11 and a half million, or a little over 1/30th ours. They've had 9,700 coronavirus deaths, which per capita would be equivalent to about 280,000 American COVID-19 fatalities (that is, more than double). However, there's scant coverage of Belgium, or other European countries which by certain measures have fared worse than the US. All focus has been on the proposal that America has "uniquely failed" compared to its peers in handling the virus, which is a half-truth at best.
Related is the "exceptional Europe" bias. Unlike Americans, who were castigated as dumb inbred rednecks for opposing shutdowns, Sweden's decision not to shut down at all was taken as an example of special Swedish wisdom, where their society was allegedly so utopian and their leaders so enlightened that doing something which would surely f*ck a country like America was seen as a good idea for them.
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wait are you arguing that racism is less evil than blasphemy? Strongly disagree.
I said it, yes. Because it is true. Because it is absolutely true. The first commandment is "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind and all your strength". The second is "Love your neighbor as yourself". Other verses mentioned circumstances where a Christian might be forced to sever even familial relations, so it's clear the first was intended to hold priority over the second.
Treating people well is certainly important. You can't neglect that. But neither can you elevate people over God. The most fundamental and grievous sin is rebellion against God; such evils as mistreating other humans is but accessory to and resultant from this.
(Also, you're defining "racism" in such broad terms that at least some of what the phrase covers is morally trivial. If it only covers the bad stuff then making Jesus white can't be racist; if making Jesus white is racist then some racism is unimportant.)
well, since the christian god doesn't exist I don't see how it is relevant.
Seeing as this is an internal affair of the church the opinions of atheists are not relevant here. Nor is any atheist in a position to draw credible moral judgment upon its practices, especially if his judgment is based on contrived secular values not found in Scripture. The church is not measured by the intensity of its devotion to man-made ideas like democracy or communism or anti-racism (as exists as an ideology merely for the sake of opposing racism broadly defined, with opposition to actual ill-effects of racism being a mere corollary issue) and I laugh at anyone who would try. It has its own values and as these are received from God they are sufficient across all time. Man-made ideas obviously can and do improve society along with the material well-being of men but they have little bearing on the matter of salvation, which is the exclusive domain of the church.
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To a Chinese person, a Jewish Jesus is no less alien than a European Jesus. The only Jesus that wouldn't be foreign is a Chinese Jesus. He doesn't benefit from the removal of whiteness since European's not the only race he considers foreign. How does he benefit? Or more to the point, who benefits?
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@HistoryBuff
Even if that's true, "racism" is not this magic existential evil, this unforgivable offense like Blasphemy of the Holy Spirit. Like anything else concerning mere inter-human relations, it comes in degrees and mainly concerns degrees of harm inflicted in fact; imagining Jesus was white because that makes Him a bit more relatable is in no way comparable to, say, murdering a black man because of his skin color. That's so unbelievably petty a thing to gripe about that I don't imagine it's a sin at all in most contexts. So far as racism simply means possessing a racial, ethnic or group bias of some type (as you're clearly suggesting), one could argue that God Himself caused that in the first place via the events of the Tower of Babel and the dispersion/division of humanity into tribes. Did God sin?
I will ask you, what positive good would it do to frame Jesus in a less relatable albeit more historically accurate way? Is placating the sensibilities of some random guy on the internet the highest good if even one person might reject Jesus and the Gospel as too alien for his tastes? Because as I said, that's not a mere hypothetical: in some parts of the world it's already happening and has been happening for a long, long time.
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As the Apostle Paul said, "To the Jew I am a Jew, to the Greek I become a Greek". But trying to make Evangelistic efforts fit local cultural conditions is not allowed because racism so I guess he should've just not done that and instead let the wider Mediterranean world reject Christ as a weird itinerant Hebrew preacher. The Jews eventually rejected Him completely so I suppose the small Jewish Christian community would've gone extinct, upon which the Word would've been snuffed out entirely. But the damnation of the entire human race would've been totally worth it, yup yup.
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@HistoryBuff
You're going out of your way to frame this in the most absolute batsh*t insane terms. Yes, most Western believers could accept Jesus as an ancient near-Eastern man with the appropriate appearance. But this makes it a little easier as it makes Him more relatable to a contemporary Western audience, as other audiences around the world have also conceived of Him in terms easier to them.
Jesus could've appeared as a green bloodsucking alien with sixteen tentacles. Had He done so He still would've been God the Son and the Christ. And I suppose at least some Christians would still accept Him if He was like that. But that would've made it harder, would it not? Why wouldn't He appear as a human? Is the whole point to test and confuse them, to the point where as few humans as possible would accept Him? If more people consider Jesus this totally foreign and unrelatable concept, and thereby reject Him and what He aimed to provide for men, and thereby end up in Hell, is that mission accomplished?
Look at the Japanese. To them Christianity is this strange foreign thing. Jesus is absolutely not relatable to them. And most people there are not Christian as a result. Is tens of millions more Japanese people in hell a worthwhile price to pay for them not committing the "racist" crime of making Jesus look Japanese?
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@HistoryBuff
That depiction has virtually no color in it. They are could be limited by the materials at their disposal. It is also entirely possible that this depiction has not held it's coloring properly over the last 1500 years.
So if He's black or brown, that's what the depiction originally looked like but if He's white then you'll just say the color didn't hold? There's no way for me to win that debate, I guess.
also, if you read the caption it explicitly says the artistic style of this is intentionally different from how he was depicted before. It also is a reflection of race tensions. They were intentionally making him look less roman, which was the previously accepted style.
More Jewish and less Roman. It clearly wasn't whitewashing and the main difference was beard or no beard, not skin color.
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@HistoryBuff
None of it's racist. One point churches always try to get across is that Jesus was a man like us (while also God) and He was sent for the sake of all people across all time. Therefore, all people across all time should be able to relate to His humanity, which is accomplished by depicting Him in a way that's relatable to any given audience. Christian missionaries, in disseminating Gospel literature to children in remote parts of the world, often draw Jesus as having an appearance similar to the local peoples. I've seen an example of this at my local church once. But in a Western setting, for an ethnic European audience, that has traditionally taken the form of a white Jesus. There's nothing wrong with that so long as the members of one race don't believe that Jesus belongs exclusively to them.
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@HistoryBuff
And finally, East Asian depiction of Jesus from the middle ages:
Epicanthic folds are a little too pronounced there, much more than you would expect from a 1st century Judaean man.
Oh and look, they're still doing the same thing today:
I guess Chinese people are racist.
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@HistoryBuff
Here's a mural of Jesus from the late 4th century:
Not so terribly different from modern Western depictions of Him.
And here's a black Jesus with a full afro from the Ethiopian Orthodox Church:
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I saw the footage from a "Horizon" game for PS5 and I can't really tell what graphical difference the upgrade would make. It looks about the same as a Nintendo Switch. If not graphical, what's its main selling point?
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@TheUnderdog
Morally sincere murder is still murder.
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@TheUnderdog
With all due respect there's so much fake crap circulating about the President I'd need to see it from somewhere more official to even consider it. Even if true, while it would reflect a gross moral failing beyond probably anything else he's done in his personal life, he is nonetheless spearheading the movement to end the practice or at least redelegate to the states the power to end the practice. Trump's involvement in one murder, if it actually happened, happened. But replacing him with Biden on account of this (or anything else) could allow hundreds of thousands of future murders to take place unabated.
Or to put it another way, any Democratic president, whether we're talking AOC or a walking piece of human refuse like Jim Carey, or even a "moderate" like Biden, would nominate justices who leaned Democrat. These would be at least "moderately" pro choice (as one might've been "moderately" pro slavery, I guess?). They would hand down rulings making it harder to restrict abortion. Even if as a presidential candidate this person said they were pro-life, and EVEN IF THEY MEANT THAT, as president they'd be tied to the institutions of their parties. A pro-life justice might also lean right on other issues, so even if as president this person might want to deal a blow to abortion he'd consider it not worth eroding his party's grasp on issues like election redistricting or corporate tax law.
If nothing else nominating such people would be an act of mutiny against his/her party and they'd deny him/her the nomination for re-election. The Democratic Party keeps notoriously tight control over its own members and relies on superdelegates to swing primaries in favor of the candidate who the top brass wants. President or not, this person wouldn't get away with a political slight of that magnitude.
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@RationalMadman
"Benevolent" dictatorships are the ultimate crapshoot. You wave unlimited unchecked power in front of somebody and there's no telling how they'll act (e.g. Robert Mugabe and Putin both played by the rules of the system for a long time before becoming dictators). Plus, getting there means sending the entire government into disarray, driving away foreign investors, fueling capital flight, tanking your country's stock market, and so on. Some citizens will respond with violence against the state and looting will be rampant. It's easy for the head of the new government to panic and order a bloody crackdown to restore order, but after that initial transgression (and knowledge that the public will invariably despise him afterward) it'd become easier for him or her to go all in and do whatever they want.
Perhaps more damningly, overthrowing democratic government even once sets a precedent that makes it easier for this to happen again and again, because suddenly a government is not an unassailable object but something that can be toppled if you don't like it. What you get is an African-style country that goes through 4 or 5 coups in 30 years. Even if one dictator's fairly benevolent the guy who forcibly replaces him/her might not be.
In the end there's no way to fix a country's government except to put in the hard work of convincing enough people to win elections, and then to win re-elections, and stay in power long enough, and with a large enough coalition on your side, to change things for the better. Some insanely unstable and poor countries (i.e. Afghanistan or Somalia) might do better with dictatorships but a rich Western country absolutely cannot afford that.
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@TheDredPriateRoberts
Sure, but laws set moral examples, because people will base their morals off of the crowd and they believe what the establishment or majority thinks is right (I mean, how many people eventually changed their minds about LGBT stuff because the media spent 30 years shilling for it). Some employers might not care about them but others take the moral examples set by laws seriously, especially if such is billed as an anti-discrimination law. Others may be worried that one day it'll catch up to them and they'll be successfully sued for said form of illegal discrimination. Overall it accomplishes good.
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