If you want to make an argument for De Bord, you will have to go further and insist that the predominant substrate of modernity is both media and therefore fake.
If, on the other hand, you are simply trying to make the argument that anti-fascist grift peddles commensurate volumes of propaganda, you will need to back it up with data.
> If a 14 year old says that they are going to change the world, they are being very sincere even if an ‘adult’ knows that the likelihood is low.
No, it's really a form of sincerity permitted by a sort of willfully affected naivete—adopted in pursuit of the strategy of Twain's amateur:
> The best swordsman in the world doesn’t need to fear the second best swordsman in the world; no, the person for him to be afraid of is some ignorant antagonist who has never had a sword in his hand before; he doesn’t do the thing he ought to do, and so the expert isn’t prepared for him; he does the thing he ought not to do: and often it catches the expert out and ends him on the spot.
— 1889, Mark Twain, “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court”
Hence why the "disruptors" so frequently, so irritatingly blast through Chesterton's Fence and/or market regulations.
Only one amateur in my portfolio need "catch" the incumbent "out".
> Only one amateur in my portfolio need "catch" the incumbent "out".
The rest can live out the rest of their short degenerate lives as the failed experiments that they are. This does however have the side effect of turning the entire town into a society of failed degenerates...
>No, it's really a form of sincerity permitted by a sort of willfully affected naivete
The willful part turns the sincerity into nihilism, people who utter sentences like:
"I could fill a notebook of quotes from this conversation. “They change your personality, it’s literally made me less shallow knowing that we can just looksmax you.” “Ugliness is just a choice now.” “I shot up a twink with ozempic who did not need to lose any weight.”"
pretty obviously don't sincerely believe what they say, quite the opposite, it's just a giant joke they're consciously in that would go away they moment they ran out of venture money or whatever finances these parties and lifestyles. These people all sound like William Gibson characters which they are aware of because they're the type of people to register that, it's like the Great Gatsby but with cringy nerds
I'm a bit confused why we are taking the drunk ramblings of people at some party so seriously. Nothing in these sentences is that weird or shocking, it's just people trying to impress each other, or fit in, or learn stuff. A lot of it is probably just made up. Nothing here is very SF-specific, except it sounds like these people use reddit a lot.
Several Muslim-majority countries have received billions in U.S. aid for decades, not just recently. The clearest examples are Egypt, Jordan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and, in humanitarian years, Syria and Yemen.
Hell, Pakistan got more than $19 billion in U.S. aid from 2002–2010, plus a $7.5 billion non-military package over five years, and Afghanistan got more than $109 billion total through USAID.
Egypt gets about $2 billion a year on average since 1979, mostly military aid.
If you're talking about open source projects or decisions by some consortium, that's not always true...or at least one business is pushing their concerns at the expense of others.
An easily remembered example is what happened (at least from Pieter Hintjens' perspective, as he wrote/complained at length about) between AMQP 0.9.1 and 1.0
The straightforward way to read a self-professed Christian—and biblical literalist—characterizing a chapter of the Bible as “affirm[ing] God’s perfect law” is as an endorsement of the laws in that chapter—in this case, condoning the stoning to death of non-celibate gay people.
It doesn't matter what is "straightforward", it matters what is true.
Kirk was being criticised by Ms. Rachel, who used a section of Leviticus ("love thy neighbour") to push back on Kirk's assertion of homosexuality as a sin. Kirk's response to Ms. Rachel was that merely a few sections later, the same Leviticus says that gays should be stoned to death.
That's a way for him to win an argument over the Bible's view on homosexuality, not a way for him to endorse the notion that gays should be stoned to death.
(And most importantly, literalists assert that that laws of Leviticus were repealed by Jesus, so even if he were a literalist Christian, the straightforward interpretation is that he does not endorse stoning gays, since Jesus repealed that law)
"You" should? Who is "you"? Just any guy on the street who decides someone else is wrong?
I am afraid that people toting this canard are seriously misinformed about the nature of Sacred Scripture, and Moses' role in leading the Israelites at that point in time.
For the Israelites, and the Jews living in Israel, Moses' law was the law of the land, the law ordained by God. It wasn't vigilante justice or extrajudicial killing. It wasn't no angry mob picking up rocks to stone someone they didn't like.
The stoning of guilty parties that was prescribed, was a state-level execution. It would be the same as any criminal who undergoes arrest, trial by peers, conviction and sentencing.
So if Kirk was saying that God's law prescribed some sentence for some offense, I hope that we can agree that Kirk wasn't encouraging gun-toting vigilantes to go out lynching people in the night without due process or without actual legislation.
Furthermore, we also need to consider the context of these citations in the course of a debate process. Kirk was not a deranged pastor shouting for violence from his bully pulpit. Indeed, many of the debates found him confronting students who were deranged or deluded in many ways, and Kirk would never shy away from meeting them where they were at.
> I am afraid that people toting this canard are seriously misinformed about the nature of Sacred Scripture
I am afraid that people are seriously misinformed about the nature of Sacred Scripture.
It's an open-ended justification for lots of horrible things.
Everybody deserves the right to worship as they see fit. The problem is that the overly enthusiastic adherents want to force everybody to live under their interpretation of the texts.
Failing to recognize this is either willful ignorance or duplicity.
We don't actually know what is true. We can only surmise from the content of his speech. Usually, when one is making assertions about one's own beliefs, one intends to be understood and so the most straightforward interpretation is likely to be the most accurate.
Or are you suggest that he was being deliberately obtuse and cryptic?
How do you think we got the grifting government? It is because people were upset with what the democrats were doing. Maybe if they stopped doing that they wouldn’t have lost. They’ve failed to lean and since Trump is so bad they still won’t need to learn and will continue their mistakes and keep losing.
And you're conveniently unaware of the historical context of the origin of that phrase too, if we're to take you literally, since you seem to entirely misunderstand how the whole reason it was problematic was due to the inherent power dynamics
People absorb the norms of their social class and start policing themselves and others without needing orders or hierarchical power dynamics.
Norm enforcement can spread faster and further than formal authority because lots of people can act on a signal whilst thinking they drew their own conclusions. Think of steve bannon's quote "politics is downstream of culture".
formal rank of the speaker is less important than that the signal comes from the socially legitimate tribe whose approval, language, and standard the subject is a member.
> Think of steve bannon's quote "politics is downstream of culture".
I'm going to be honest: if you think Steve Bannon is a thought leader, I don't think we'd agree on pretty much anything.
> formal rank of the speaker is less important than that the signal comes from the socially legitimate tribe whose approval, language, and standard the subject is a member.
You're claiming that a random stranger on an internet forum has as much social power as the literal monarch of a country. That's absurd, no matter how much fancy language you use to try to justify it.
Indeed, one of the great wisdoms of history is that a mobs have no power. We are very wise men so we know that there are no peer reviewed controlled trials showing mobs having power. We call this thing Science.
If you want to make an argument for De Bord, you will have to go further and insist that the predominant substrate of modernity is both media and therefore fake.
If, on the other hand, you are simply trying to make the argument that anti-fascist grift peddles commensurate volumes of propaganda, you will need to back it up with data.
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