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There have been a lot of budget cuts proposed or already enacted by DOGE, the Trump Administration, and the recent Congressional appropriations bill.
My job, without getting into any more detail, is maybe 50 percent just to listen to people's complaints about this or that program being defunded, and how horrible this will be for children, for low income people, for public health, for this or that endangered animal species, or whatnot. Some of these people are quite vitriolic, and liberally hurl invectives about how "unchristian" it is for Republicans to support these measures. And I always have the same retort (though of course I'm screaming into the void to be heard by nobody), which is "Jesus would open his own wallet".
This is an idea I had the other day: the USFG budget would be divided into two categories: core and peripheral spending. Core spending would cover necessary government functions, such as defense, policing, infrastructure, debt repayments, etc. A sizable chunk of the budget, perhaps a majority of all Federal spending, would fall into this camp. This would be covered by tax revenue just as it is now.
But then the remainder would be classified as peripheral spending. This would not be covered by tax dollars, and it'd take some kind of emergency act of Congress to allocate tax dollars toward government programs of this kind.
A little known fact is that you can make direct monetary donations to the government. Very few people do, but I suspect this is a combination of ignorance and mindset reasons; after all, why make a donation when the whole point of taxes is to cover the government's budget?
But anyway, yes, all dollars allocated toward peripheral spending would be raised by donations. These donations would fall into two types.
First, you could donate to a general fund, which is spent at the government's discretion on peripheral programs. Second, you could donate to a specific program or government agency. Let's say that a small program gets enough in a flash flood of donations (say, because of a viral video by some TikTok influencer) to fund itself for 200 years given current budgetary assumptions about the program. If the program has enough stored up to cover, say, the next 5 years given current budgetary assumptions, then the remainder would automatically be diverted to the general fund. Peripheral programs would be effectively privatized but retain the expertise, institutional guardrails against graft, and name recognition and "official" status of Federal programs (most charitable donations would be directed to them as opposed to many obscure charities with the same purpose, and stand positioned to take advantage of economy of scale much like they do now).
After this, there'd be no more complaining that food stamps was about to get defunded and a bunch of children were about to go hungry, or that Medicaid was about to become a straightforward health insurance program with no subsidies behind it. It'd be as generously funded as the public was generous, subject only to the aforementioned common sense limits (unlikely to be reached for a program of that size anyway). You could no longer pass the buck of your civic responsibility to some rich guy somewhere, or to your unborn grandchildren if said rich guy had the same idea. If those kids went to bed hungry then that would be a moral indictment of you.
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The problem with what you wrote, I guess, is that (a). it sounds like more simping for authoritarian strongmen with unchecked power that's screwed half the world over already, and (b). it sounds like a completely passive and fatalistic way of thinking that would have you do nothing to improve the world until this purported messianic figure showed up.
Granted, I haven't done much for the world either, but in theory I could do a lot if I were more motivated (and perhaps had better people skills than I have in reality). And this tells me how, in theory, I could do something in the here and now. You'd just need one or two guys to get the ball rolling.
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Nah, the odds of getting shot for politely asking your neighbor to stop letting their dog poop in your yard, or turning down the volume on their boombox at 3 AM, are so slim as to not be taken seriously. The kind of people so unhinged that they would brandish a gun for being mildly confronted probably don't have guns anymore, because odds are that someone before you had the displeasure and said people are now barred from owning one. And those who killed for such a trifling reason are probably not your neighbors, because they're serving half a lifetime behind bars.
Every person has his threshold at which he'd be willing to shoot someone, but those with enough of a hair trigger temper (or sense of paranoia) that commonplace interactions set them off have effectively removed themselves from the equation. This gives people enough breathing room to say what they need to, when they need to, albeit perhaps with a healthy degree of self-control over the tone and phrasing.
But, it doesn't give them enough breathing room to feel safe acting as bullies, mercilessly harassing someone in person, or taking a swing at them. This is the way it ought to be. Guns afford you a right to be left alone that you don't have without. It doesn't matter how unpopular you are, or if some people in wider society have the notion that you are an acceptable target for mistreatment. When their behavior escalates to the point where you can less tolerate how they treat you than how the state would treat you, your gun ownership allows the problem to correct itself. When people have an accurate understanding of roughly how far they can provoke the average person, things settle into a reasonable equilibrium: a common sense understanding of how to treat other people.
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@ResurgetExFavilla
Three Houses is my favorite too, though the online fandom (re: the people who've played all of the game and are knowledgeable enough to compare them on a technical level) seems to rate it poorly. Breeding is a rather cynical way of framing it, as (in Awakening) two characters simply get married and the kids they'd hypothetically have at some point in the future travel to the past. The description of how it works in Fates is arguably a bit closer to breeding, but that game is creepy for other reasons too.
While I haven't played Path of Radiance or Radiant Dawn (I did watch most of a playthrough of the former), I'm not sure if they're a "return to the series' roots", if by that you mean the Kaga era games. Sure, PoR has a linear story unlike Blazing Blade and lacks a Gaiden-style overworld unlike Sacred Stones, but all this really tells me is that it's mechnically and narratively simple, something that not all Kaga era games were.
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To shortly summarize:
1. The USFG is authorized to withhold Federal funding for Medicaid to states that aren't in compliance with certain conditions written into Federal statute. In 2018 South Carolina blocked Planned Parenthood from receiving Medicaid funds under a state law that prohibited use of public funds for abortion, while taking steps to ensure that entities which provided similar non-abortion services would still be available in the state. Planned Parenthood and one of its patients (she received gynecological treatment) sued. Per this ruling, private parties lack standing to meddle (sue) in an agreement between the Fed and the states unless the relevant statutes clearly confer rights on individuals.
2. The relevant statutes don't confer individual rights in this case.
The search terms "six", "weeks", or "6 w" do not appear in this document, so I'm not sure where you got that from. Maybe the South Carolina law in question said this, but said law was not expanded across the country.
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Anything Fire Emblem or Danganronpa. Since at this point we're probably not getting any more Danganronpa, I'm open to other game made by Kazutaka Kodaka since the style is very similar.
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@thett3
I watched both seasons, and I agree that it was pretty good. Season 2 maybe wasn't as fresh as Season 1, but it helped that going into it I understood what was going on unlike starting Season 1.
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@ResurgetExFavilla
You weren't Skep by any chance, were you?
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Lashwnda was hilarious, but also an obvious troll account (somebody even pointed out that the profile pic was AI generated), and probably an alt of an existing user, so.
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@badger
That post Swag, try that one. That's the idea I was getting at in this thread.
As I said, people who voted for Trump had secular motives for doing so. Namely that he was the Republican nominee who would push Republican policies.
Now obviously there's a correlation between religion and right-wing politics, and irreligion and left-wing politics. That's irrelevant to the question of Trump's personal character, as if forced to choose between a hypothetical Biden with all of the same scandals and his right-wing opponent (let's say not Trump but somebody with the same politics as Trump) the vast majority of Democrats would choose Biden.
I demonstrated this in a previous thread where I delved into Gloria Steinem's (a prominent 20th century feminist) public defense of Bill Clinton following the Lewinsky Scandal. And now that we know blanket pardons were being issued in Biden's name via autopen that he apparently had no knowledge of and didn't give his consent to (re: he was eerily close to being a literal puppet president), they can still do nothing but scream about Trump.
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I think you should go back and read my opening post. I invite any discussion of it.
You mean the study? The summary of which says:
People who believe they’ve been forgiven by God may be more likely to forgive themselves after hurting someone—but this self-forgiveness doesn’t always lead them to apologize. In fact, a new study published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin found that divine forgiveness can actually make people less likely to apologize by satisfying their internal need for resolution. At the same time, divine forgiveness can also boost feelings of gratitude and humility, which, in turn, can lead to more heartfelt and sincere apologies. The study reveals that divine forgiveness works through two opposing pathways—one that inhibits and one that supports the act of apologizing.
That's not exactly a damning indictment of religious people. It only suggests what we've always known: that religion has the power to change people both for the better and for the worse.
That structure seems to lead to a whole lot of sex scandals
Public school teachers, a demographic that skews both secular and well educated, are more than a hundred times as likely as Catholic priests to diddle kids. It just makes for a juicier headline to talk about the latter being naughty.
@badger
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@FLRW
Socioeconomic class has an intergenerational character. As the old saying goes, rich kids teach their kids how to be rich and poor kids teach their kids how to be poor. But even if competent, self-made people are more likely to become atheists, it doesn't follow that less competent people will magically gain competency by ditching what may well be the one thing providing a sense of structure to their lives.
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@badger
Doesn't look great for him. Pornstar wife. Weird sexual comments about his own daughter. Best friend to Jeffrey Epstein.
Sure, he's a creepy hedonistic coastal elite. If he were running for Pope this would be problematic. But the presidency is a secular office; the only relevant criterion is how good a job he'll do. Admittedly I'm less than thrilled with his second term performance thus far, but in any case that has nothing to do with what you were saying about religion.
That seems a fairly arbitrary dismissal. I'm talking about today. Read the thread. Did you get stuck on the title? I have given the religion its credit where it was due.
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I think it's very obvious that today the more irreligious a country, the more moral.
I sidestepped the question of "moral" because the American Left has pushed for abortion on demand, and facilitated a genocide of 63 million of their countrymen since 1973, among the largest in human history, and presumably European countries "boast" statistics much like this one. So instead, I focused on prosperity.
And in terms of prosperity, history paints a rather clear picture: highly stratified societies with strong civic norms and rule of law, especially those which practiced the Protestant (re: Calvinist) work ethic, invented modernity. After they came to enjoy an abundance of pleasures to give their life meaning outside of religion, they secularized. You could argue this proves that they don't need religion to stay prosperous, and I suppose I can't disprove this, outside of maybe discussing low birth rates that demand long term replacement by more religious immigrants. But what you claimed is that irreligion was the original cause of said prosperity, which is ridiculous. It's like claiming that owning a sports car is the cause of wealth as opposed to a consequence of it.
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@badger
A thousand years on, you elected a rapist as president. Religious right in Poland recently elected a pimp.
Had the religious right nominated a pastor, you would've screamed and convulsed and cursed more fervently than normal at us, complaining that we were mixing religion and politics (which conveniently no one complains about when black churches led the civil rights movement). Now that our politics are secular focused and we nominated a very secular man (never in his life convicted of rape), you scream and convulse and curse at us just the same. Hmm...
I think it's very obvious that today the more irreligious a country, the more moral.
It's true that some countries which became rich and prosperous under Christianity then proceeded to become irreligious and happened to retain their wealth and prosperity after that (at least in the short term; who knows how sustainable this is in the long term). But what I'd like for you to do is point me to a country that was atheistic and then went from poor to rich. Otherwise you have a very weak case for what you're claiming.
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Neat theory. It'd be a shame if anything were to poke a hole in it, like any instance of Christians aggressively pushing for behavioral controls that, if successfully realized on a large scale, would have a net positive effect on the world.
Oh wait, Prohibition. Between half and more than three-quarters of all sexual assaults happen when either the perpetrator or victim is drunk. Same for 63% of all violent crimes, 40% of homicides, 30-70% of suicide attempts, 30% of car crash deaths, and so on. Globally, about 2.6 million people die every year from alcohol.
Or laws against infanticide, or against 50 year old men raping barely pubescent prostitutes. The other day I watched the documentary "One Child Nation". In its heyday, you could pretty much find dead babies just walking down the street in China. If that's what it was like in 1990s China, I can scarcely imagine Ancient Rome before Constantine.
Atheists generally don't feel the need to ask anyone's forgiveness, be that God or man, because they're in denial about the dark side of their own natures. Said denial, of course, does nothing to actually make them better people. The first step to fixing any problem is to admit that you have one. Granted, not everyone who so admits goes on to fix the problem, but neither do all but exceedingly few problem deniers.
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The people talking about the 2015 deal are missing the point. It provided sanctions relief to a regime that would've used the influx of money to: (A). internally shore up its own existence; (B). fund more terrorist (AKA "regional proxy") activities and further destabilize the Middle East, and make the Suez Canal shipping route that much more unsafe; and (C). build up and modernize its military, which notoriously still maintains a fleet of F-14s from the Shah era, posing a greater threat to Israel and US forces in the region, and enabling them to better defend their military nuclear program from attack once they resumed work on it. The deal also permitted Iran to keep a civilian nuclear program, which of course was always a potential stepping stone to a military nuclear program.
It's now the year that JCPOA would've expired, and thanks to this operation Iran still doesn't have the bomb, and now probably won't until such a time that they would've otherwise acquired the bomb post-JCPOA, but they've also been eating the costs of sanctions the past 7 years and are weaker than they've ever been. They couldn't prop up the Assad regime and it collapsed. Hezbollah, once regarded by Israel as an existential threat, fought the Jewish state and lost, because there was a limit to how much Iran could fund and arm them. The Iraqi paramilitaries haven't taken over the country yet, and plausibly never will.
Once this present conflict ends, hopefully in a couple of days/weeks, it'll become immediately clear that the Middle East today is a more secure place because Trump exited the deal. For some inexplicable reason Trump is savvy and capable of long-term reasoning when it comes to Iran but not with Russia lol.
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Let's give Netanyahu some credit here. I doubt Trump would've risked a B-2 if not for all the groundwork the Israelis did ahead of this operation, which came at the cost of the lives of Israeli citizens. All the US had to do was deal the finishing blow. Assuming things end here, we'll walk away without serious damage to our own reputation unlike, say, in Iraq in 2003, as all we did was detonate a few conventional bombs under a mountain that, according to the left, had no facility buried inside of it anyway so there should be no fatalities per this line of reasoning.
But now comes the hard part. Will we successfully convince the Iranians that it's time for a regime change, or will this be a short-lived victory that we'll have to repeat in 5 years?
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@WyIted
Can you (non-jokingly) summarize your politics? What do you believe? What reforms do you want to see happen in America?
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@Ultracrepidarian
I've never been a fan of the name debateart either.
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I think Trump's a strong candidate when he isn't an incumbent.
One thing I heard back around 2016 was that, somewhat counterintuitively from our point of view, the Trump team did a lot of research on identifying the winning issues before he threw his hat in the ring. He is democracy in action: rather than embodying an agenda for which getting elected is merely a means to carrying it out, the Trumpian agenda conforms to the goal of getting elected. The man can and will waffle on anything.
The word pandering gets thrown around a lot, but I'd like to define what it is: the mismatch between how strongly a target audience supports X and how strongly the average person outside of said target audience opposes X, which amounts to a net electoral gain. Trump welcomed the most disreputable factions of the old left into the new GOP and built a coalition where hippie moms, disgruntled rust belters, and what's left of the conservative Christians shared a partisan tent.
The problem is, if you want to get reelected then you are expected to keep the promises you made to those whose votes got you there the first time. And when that means handing the keys of the HHS to RFK Jr., or jacking the price of everything to protect the jobs of a minority of constituents located in this or that factory town, ordinary people do start to care a lot more. Conversely, if you give those people the middle finger, but your name is Donald Trump, then the mainstream will continue to hate you regardless and that's how you get 2020.
The GOP is probably in for a rude awakening come the next midterms at least, if not in 2028 too.
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I can link you to some easy to understand examples of this if you want.
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@21Pilots
actually good music are blocked out by money burning singers whose voices around like a dolphin trying to speak.
I think there's a degree of irony you aren't consciously aware of in lodging this complaint (that vocals in modern music sound too chaotic and visceral) while also complaining about the use of computers in music.
In music, there are those who believe that there's one objectively correct way to, say, play Chopin's Raindrop Prelude. And I disagree.
Now, at first glance this sounds nonsensical, since of course there's sheet music for this piece and if you just did your own thing it'd no longer be Chopin's Raindrop Prelude. But I name this piece because it's the perfect candidate for a small degree of controlled chaos. If there's a slight delay in striking certain notes, it just sounds richer (and more suitable to the theme of rain) than if you were to play it strictly per the notation.
Those who wanted the perfectly rendered Raindrop Prelude would have no reason to listen to a world class pianist play it live, since any computer can execute the same maneuver flawlessly. But what do you get? A completely predictable experience. Every note in a given segment is the exact same volume, and the exact specified length. Nothing at all unexpected happens. It's perfect to the point of being a tad boring and unspirited.
I would suggest that in the future (heck, maybe in 2 or 3 years), AI will be capable of mimicking technically perfect human vocals as well. When this AI vocalist is on the note G per the notation, they sing exactly the note G. There is never an improvised "trill" effect for lack of a better word.
When this day comes, I suggest it will be the very fact that a human voice is unlike computerized vocals that sells human music. And I don't mean this in the sense of people buying subpar human music out of a feeling of obligation to support human artists, but rather as a matter of authentic preference by many listeners.
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@21Pilots
Listen to this whole song (2023) with headphones and then tell me if you've changed your mind.
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@yachilviveyachali
What does this serve? For example, there is no one who knows more about the Holocaust than the Jew, yet the Jew is embroiled in wars and facing accusations of present-day genocide.
I disagree that what Israel's doing now is a genocide as opposed to just a very rough military campaign against insurgents literally tunneled beneath every building in the Gaza Strip (the Gazan death rate isn't nearly high enough to convince me they're being deliberately killed off), but even if for the sake of argument you were right, one can teach about a historic genocide without denying that the descendants of the victims are also capable of the same sin.
It would also be better if we took no side.
My gawd, are we bothsides-ing the Holocaust now?
Do children need to learn about genocide?
I mean, not kindergartners or first graders, obviously, but this is something they're going to learn at some point by the time they graduate high school, so.
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@yachilviveyachali
I don't think I've ever had a runner's high. I felt a sense of pride and accomplishment the one time I managed 5 miles, but I wouldn't quite compare it to a high. As for sports, no, I've never been interested in sports. I don't even like to watch them. Wouldn't mind if I did more roller skating because I do enjoy that but it isn't a sport.
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Still not on board with stifling free speech, though. Lannan might've possibly had one bully (some minor user) but otherwise there's no reason to think anything he experienced on DDO was what pushed him over the edge (IIRC he'd been inactive on DDO for some time prior to it happening). Even if it did, rules against bullying and freedom to express political opinions are by no means incompatible.
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@AdaptableRatman
I remember another guy. A soldier or veteran who had Sword Art Online stuff on his profile, and I think he was in Iraq. Don't remember what his username was, but I know one of his relatives logged onto his account to tell us what happened to him.
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@yachilviveyachali
I'm very sedentary and I eat copious amounts of sugar and fat, and I often stay up to 3 AM. I make an effort to run maybe 3 times a week, but in the last few weeks I've hit a rut and can't push myself to the level of intense workout I was at before. But even with where I was before, that's not enough to make up for an entire day of sitting, basically every day. I do try to eat a handful of spinach every night, but I'm not consistent in doing this and even then it wouldn't make up for my terrible diet.
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I don't think I've ever had the serious desire to kill myself.
My theory is that people tend to cope with stress by directing aggressive thoughts/actions either toward themselves (i.e. they have "self-defeating personalities") or toward things or people external to themselves. Suicidal types are usually of the former kind. I'm of the latter. That's just how it goes; you don't control which camp you fall into. I suspect people of the former type are morally better, so I'm not saying this from a place of perceived superiority.
I guess it also helps that I haven't suffered objectively severe hardship in my life to date. My health's still pretty good despite my terrible lifestyle. At most I sometimes feel overwhelmed by work, but that stress immediately goes away once I've caught up.
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@AdaptableRatman
If I were to call myself Christian, it'd be Protestant (probably Evangelical) Christian. But at least at this stage in my life I'm too addicted to junk food, traps, incredible laziness, doing and giving nothing to help my neighbor, and over-the-top murder fantasies when I'm even slightly mad to say with any degree of confidence whatsoever that I am saved if Christianity is true.
On an gut level I probably believe in the Christian God more strongly than I don't, but the idea of Hell seems much more real to me than Heaven.
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Judaism: Incredibly boring. The idea of being part of the Jewish community has its appeal, but what little I've read of the Talmud suggests to me that it's a more effective sleep aid than Nyquil. Haven't been able to find the interesting legends and anecdotes that it supposedly contains. Learning Hebrew and then reading the Tanakh in that language sounds like it could be fun but also super hard and I don't imagine that all Jews are able to do it. Being a boring religion isn't all bad, though, because it lends itself to moderation. Jews are among the few non-white races willing to genuinely acknowledge and criticize their own side's bigotry and racism, and I can respect that.
Catholicism: I have had a little real-world exposure to Catholicism in the form of "Radio Maria", a terrible quality radio program that I sometimes play in my car. And yes, listening to it has reaffirmed all the stereotypes I already had about Catholicism (the other day its presenter unironically said you have to be perfect to get into Heaven and framed this as something doable by human effort). Immersion in a culture with a heavy degree of continuity with that of Medieval Europe could be interesting, but in practice it's retarded. A lot of emphasis on repetitious prayer, which I can attest as someone who mentally repeats mantras often of a religious nature to counter intrusive thoughts doesn't do anything to make you a better person. I can't rule out that it does if you're deeply meditating on the meaning of the words, but I imagine that for your average Catholic it's just a mindless chore.
Eastern Orthodoxy: I once thought they were cool, and not from the usual internet "Orthobro" exposure. Rather, back when I was still in college I wrote a paper on the Old Believers and did something of a deep dive into Russian Orthodox spirituality and what I read impressed me. They've got a neat aesthetic going on but I do think in the long term they're going to go the way of the dinosaurs. Their tendency to jump in bed with authoritarian strongmen isn't doing them any favors.
Mormonism: Everyone but Mormons themselves understands this to be a fake religion invented by a known conman, but they're too brainwashed to admit it. I imagine most of them are decent people though, and it's nice to see a group of white Americans with a relatively high birthrate and wholesome family values (though the Amish do it better).
Hinduism: The most archaic of the world religions by far, and it shows. Hinduism still incorporates use of animal dung into rituals and devotional practices, and tries to preserve a late Bronze Age caste system with a vast untouchable class in the 21st century. On paper it and Buddhism are the most intellectually sophisticated religions, but it really seems like they just endlessly heap ideas on top of ideas without it doing anyone any good. India today is pretty much Sub-Saharan Africa with some impressive old buildings thrown in. Reincarnation as a concept was known to many ancient societies, including in Europe.
Buddhism: A strand of Hinduism that went cosmopolitan and adapted itself well to local conditions across East Asia. It has the strengths of Hinduism without its weaknesses. But it doesn't have that much appeal to me.
Islam: The closest to Christianity of all non-Christian religions, since it developed within a Judeo-Christian milieu and incorporates aspects of both. Paradoxically, the non-Christian religion most likely to do violence against Christians. It's also the opposite of Christianity in that, whereas Jesus was a morally ideal man whose followers have very much struggled to live up to that, Islam was founded by an obvious pedo whose followers have worked to be better than him and reinterpret the religion in a sophisticated light, i.e. Sufism. When you take into account fundamentalist strains, it's just barely better suited for the modern world than Hinduism.
Confucianism: A political philosophy disguised as a religion.
Taoism: I know next to nothing about Taoism. Something something yin and yang.
Shinto: I know next to nothing about Shinto aside from the tourist spots I've seen depicted in anime. Pretty much a dead religion nowadays.
Sikhism: An eclectic mix of Islam and Hinduism. They don't strike me as being half as interesting as this description would imply.
Atheism: There's a whole lot of normal people who in practice don't believe in God and just live their lives without involvement in religion, but Atheists are a bunch of terminally online fat guys who make their entire personality out of it.
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You know Iran's playing a dangerous game when the corresponding Wikipedia entry on their war against Israel isn't slanted against the latter...
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@Savant
Politicians are scared of open violence because their perceived legitimacy rests in large part on the state's promise to offer security against violence. In dictatorships, failure in this area can mean a coup. In liberal democracies, it can mean that incumbents lose the next election. This is why certain strains of anarchism (the political philosophy) view terrorism, criminality, and blatant antisocial behavior as morally good things.
If the voting public consists of affluent people known to adopt luxury beliefs about crime, said fact can act as a buffer against this outcome but only to an extent. There is some hypothetical point beyond which basic self-preservation will kick in even for these people, as California's Proposition 36 all but proved.
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I miss when things were wholesome, like just a bunch of people having fun watching cars burn, singing Kumbaya.
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@WyIted
Really though, I've never heard this kind of testimonial before. It's almost as if they had the potential to be a genuinely good and wholesome group if the top brass wasn't a bunch of greedy cult leaders. Perhaps the world could use more of what you initially experienced, but played straight and without the bullcrap mind games. For some reason that doesn't seem to really exist.
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@WyIted
Did you ever have the Xenu narrative told to you in any of the courses?
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@Castin
They try to keep a very sanitized public image and probably spend a lot of money/volunteer hours on outreach to yuppies who don't know a lot about the group. Said yuppies, lured into their building by promises of spiritual awakening or whatever the pitch is, get offered a free "auditing" session.
They speak to an unlicensed, phoney shrink and spill their guts about their personal issues, not unlike Catholic confession. The shrink keeps a record of whatever compromising things were said, and then viola, the church has dirt on that individual. From there, some people are just gullible or emotionally vulnerable enough to willingly pay for the courses that they think will clear their souls of the billion year old volcano demons haunting them and making them feel sad. Others might be blackmailed into doing so, or at minimum they'll be threatened to keep quiet upon leaving so that the next batch of new arrivals isn't scared off.
The Church of Scientology doesn't ascribe to conventional morality about turning the other cheek, and considers any critic of the church to be "fair game" for a prolonged and brutal retaliation campaign.
A big part of their advertising, of course, entails big name celebrity endorsements. Tom Cruise not only joined the group but was treated exceptionally well and enjoyed all manner of privileges to buy his loyalty. It should also be said that people like him, with deep pockets, are likely their primary customer base as well.
Finally, we shouldn't rule out second generation church members, who've been indoctrinated from childhood and are probably made to hand over the bulk of their time, money, and energy to the group.
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Not long ago I watched a pretty long interview of an ex-neo Nazi recounting his time with the movement back in the '80s and '90s.
One of his insights was telling: they spent a lot of time and effort trying to convince young white men that they were under attack because of the color of their skin, which was how their movement recruited most of its new members. This was a lot harder to do back then because said narrative rather plainly wasn't true. There was a general "live and let live" and "colorblindness is good" attitude in society. But apparently the neo-Nazis have a much easier time persuading people today, since the left and Black America have adopted a far more openly hateful stance toward their white neighbors in the last 10+ years.
Again, this was from the mouth of a person who no longer believes in neo-Nazism but has like a decade of personal experience with its inner workings. He dispassionately testified that the self-described opponents of racism are doing a lot of the heavy lifting toward actively making the problem worse.
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@Mall
Yes, you must be fully initiated into the cult to understand that it's really a good thing and right about everything, or else you'll only be confused by information that contradicts its core narratives, like the bad things alleged by apostates who deserted it with their "testimonials of abuse", or "evidence that the founder was a fraud and a plagiarist who wanted to skim a quick buck off his gullible followers", and all that nonsense hippie bullcrap.
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Lashwnda is a beautiful, strong, independent black woman who don't need no man. I hope she manages to achieve #justice4tyrone
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The problem with this is that the laws are interpreted to afford convicted criminals a lot of leeway. I recently watched a video where a man was sentenced to death for raping and killing a child, and he looked pretty calm, because he knew he had infinite appeals and, even if none of them managed to overturn his sentence, he could plausibly drag his case out until the end of his natural lifespan. And sure enough, that guy has appealed.
This almost certainly wasn't the original intent of the Framers of the Constitution, seeing how they lived in an age where a man could be sentenced to hang for a robbery and then have the sentence carried out on noon of the following day, and they were apparently fine with this. But the currently in vogue interpretation of the law would be very hard to replace.
A potentially easier alternative would be what I call "Engagement Doctrine". Basically, there is a window of time between when a person begins to act in the commission of a violent crime, and when they've clearly acted to disengage themselves from said activity in a way that a reasonable person could discern, during which their right not to be killed by anyone is forfeit. If this doctrine was recognized by the courts, and if the police were to become highly efficient at finding and killing criminals during said window without a large number of miscalculations, it could do far more than our nerfed death penalty to keep our streets and communities safe.
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@LucyStarfire
That hasn't seriously been the case since 2003, dude.
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@LucyStarfire
An "LGBTQ Tolerance Day" would've sufficed to promote human rights. But the framing of "Pride Month" goes beyond the mere promotion of tolerance.
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Pride Month can still be privately observed by whoever wants to do it, and obviously is still being privately observed by a large number of people/corporations, so to say the whole thing has been canceled is silly.
Easter is neither a Federal holiday nor on Wikipedia's list of observances declared by presidential proclamation, whereas Christmas at this point has been very much commercialized and secularized, and to much of the population isn't plainly connected to Christianity. For gay pride to have an entire month of being celebrated by the Federal government seems sketchy from a standpoint of secularism (re: the principle of government neutrality in matters of religion/irreligion and of ideologies detrimentally impacting religion in general).
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