ilinamorato

ilinamorato, 1 month ago

@thomastospace I feel like there's a joke about "floats" and "boats" here, but I can't quite sea it.

ilinamorato, 2 months ago

@futurebird I'm hopeful it means the grift is coming to an end, and these are all the people smart enough to get out before they're the ones left holding the bag.

ilinamorato, 2 months ago

@LePertti I don't think they can, at least not any easier than a regular crawler could. They don't actually have access to that data, except maybe if users have Jetpack installed. Plus, I'm not even sure if there's a "phone home" in the code, so they may not even know where all the active WordPress installs are.

I could be wrong, but I think self-hosted sites are safe for now.

ilinamorato, 2 months ago

@MrBehemo @LePertti honestly I'm kind of surprised nobody has yet.

ilinamorato, 3 months ago

Here's some context:

ilinamorato, 3 months ago

1. Seth Dillon is an American conservative. He runs the Babylon Bee.

2. The Bee used to be "The Onion but for Christians" but has shifted significantly toward "The Onion but for Conservatives." It's also very much not funny, though when it was making fun of its own tribe it was occasionally amusing.

ilinamorato, 3 months ago

3. One of Jesus' most well-known and well-attested sermons is recorded in Luke 10:25-37, in which Jesus tells the story of the Good Samaritan. It can be found here: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke%2010%3A25-37&version=NIV

4. The Good Samaritan was a parable told in response to a religious person who believed he was better than everyone else.

5. That religious person asked Jesus, essentially, how to be a good person; but Jesus knew that he was an expert in the Bible and turned it back around on him. "What is written?"

ilinamorato, 3 months ago

6. When the religious person gave his answer ("Love God with your whole self, and love your neighbor as yourself") Jesus affirmed his answer. Jesus Himself had given that answer, too; in Matthew 22:36-40 and Mark 12:28-31. These commands come from Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18, so they're not new ideas from Jesus; they're what God expected of His people since they were His people. Deuteronomy and Leviticus are the law that God gave His people when they were brought out of Egypt.

ilinamorato, 3 months ago

7. The religious person responded to Jesus by asking "but who is my neighbor?" Luke, the author, says that this wasn't asked in good faith, but in an attempt to "justify himself." He was trying to have his cake and eat it too: to not love his neighbor, but still have eternal life, by strictly defining "neighbor" to exclude people he didn't like.

8. Jesus told the parable of the Good Samaritan to answer this question.

ilinamorato, 3 months ago

9. The parable Jesus tells begins with the mugging of a man traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho. Jesus clearly intended this person to be interpreted as a Jew; He was talking to other Jews, and the man was walking between two towns in Israel. It is of note to modern readers, though not directly relevant to this tweet, that Jericho is in what we call the West Bank today.

10. The man in the parable is robbed, stripped, and beaten, and left behind "half dead" on the side of the road.

ilinamorato, 3 months ago

11. Jesus then notes the approach of three people, all of whom see the wounded man and respond in various ways:

12. A priest walks by and crosses to the other side so that he doesn't have to deal with this dying man. The priest would've been expected to know the Scriptures the best, and be explicitly connected with carrying them out to the letter, but he ignores the victim instead.

ilinamorato, 3 months ago

13. A Levite walks by and also crosses to the other side. Levites (people from the tribe of Levi) were the chosen family line to become priests, and were expected to be "experts in the law;" it's possible if not probable that the man who originally asked Jesus this question was himself a Levite; and even if not, he would likely have identified very strongly with the Levites, as an "expert in the law."

ilinamorato, 3 months ago

14. Jesus then mentions the approach of a Samaritan. The Samaritans are a religious group (they still exist), and at the time of Jesus, the schism between Samaritans and Judeans was still very raw; but the important thing to know about the Samaritans is that the religiously-minded Jews of the time hated the Samaritans. A lot. Jesus' mention of a Samaritan to this religiously-minded man would've been like telling a MAGA that a socialist approached the man.

Or -ahem- an illegal immigrant.

ilinamorato, 3 months ago

15. The Samaritan, of the three people who passed this wounded man, is the only one to actually offer help; and he does so lavishly, offering a nearby innkeeper essentially a blank check to care for him.

16. Then, Jesus re-asks the question to the religious man: "which of the three was this man's neighbor?" The religious man's response may have been an unwillingness to even say the name "Samaritan:" he just says "the one who had mercy on him."

ilinamorato, 3 months ago

17. The message here has been interpreted with many different foci and angles, but the historically orthodox reading has a pretty solid consensus: who your neighbor is doesn't have anything to do with your relationship to the person, or your history with their people group, or their righteousness. Your neighbor is "anyone who needs your help," or even more laconically, "everyone." There's very little debate on this consensus reading.

ilinamorato, 3 months ago

18. It's also worth noting that whether the person has done harm to you doesn't affect Jesus' conclusion that they're your neighbor: about a century and a half before Jesus tells this parable, the (Judean) Hasmonean King Hyrcanus had prosecuted a devastating "holy war" against the Samaritan people, destroying their lands and even their temple on Mount Gerizim, meaning that the Samaritan in this story was actually helping someone whose people had devastated his homeland.

ilinamorato, 3 months ago

19. Further, the victim's nakedness would've been of note. Public nudity in Jewish society was not only frowned upon but seen as the height of shame and humiliation. It couldn't be countenanced by people in polite society. People who were naked, even if they were naked through no fault of their own should just cover up. That's the right way to seek help, you see. But Jesus doesn't care whether someone is doing things "the right way" when determining their "neighbor" status.

ilinamorato, 3 months ago

20. Throughout Christian history, the word "neighbor" has been identified with this parable, and with other, similar statements Jesus made about "neighbors." If a Christian talks to you about "neighbors" in a theological or philosophical sense, they mean "everybody."

ilinamorato, 3 months ago

21. Or, at least, they should. It's true that, particularly in America, we've had trouble with this. A decent chunk of American history revolves around redefining "neighbor" to do exactly what the religious man in Luke 10 was trying to do: justify himself. Make his hating of other people okay by not calling them people.

ilinamorato, 3 months ago

22. So, with that baseline: the original tweet reads, "if Jesus is your savior then the people on the other side of that razor wire are your neighbors." What Berkobien is invoking is this parable, and the much older Hebrew law that underpins it. Jesus told us to love our neighbor (everyone), regardless of their ethnicity (Samaritan, Judean, American, or Latine), righteousness (nakedness, clothed-ness, or immigration status), or real or imagined slights (holy war, crossing the border illegally).

ilinamorato, 3 months ago

23. And in the QT, in an attempt to discredit the original tweet, Dillon attempts a reducto ad absurdum: "if Jesus is your savior then anyone trying to break into your home is your neighbor." But the point of the Parable of the Good Samaritan is that it doesn't matter what they're doing, they're still your neighbor, and your responsibility to love them is not diminished.

We can debate how to love them--that's politics--but whether you're supposed to love them was settled 2,000 years ago.

ilinamorato, 3 months ago

@jeffjarvis ugh. I've gradually stopped paying attention to Mashable and unfollowed them socially over time as their feed became overrun with Wordle tips and sale ads; this might get them out of my RSS reader altogether.

In fairness, that is probably what all the Google searches are right now. But they could've tagged a "(you can't yet)" after the headline.

ilinamorato, 3 months ago

@PacificNic Centers for Disease Consideration