A public school in Alabama invited a preacher to speak to students about Jesus and lead them in prayer. One reason we know that is because the preacher bragged about how he got away with itonline....
This is relatively common. A good many of the abstinence-only sex-ed career-lecturers present not only a cruel value system (if you’re a girl, your verifiable virginity is your only value. If you’re a guy, don’t date until you’re ready to put a ring on her worth two months salary) but also go pretty deep into modern post-Fifield conservative Christian dogma. And these lectures are mandatory attendance by the whole class in the auditorium.
So it’s not surprising to me that school administrators and district administrators might be looking at other ways to give their flock extra doses of indoctrination.
I can’t speak for how it affects typical students, but I can’t forget that my school willfully lied to me, and hence was antagonistic towards its students (at very least my class) at the behest of the state, and this factors into my relationship with the states of California and the United States. Hence I try to let kids know that they really are in a Young Adult Dystopian Novel, and their story is how they break free from the state’s efforts to turn them into yet another cheap laborer / soldier for billionaire vanity projects.
My understanding is Hamas was supplied by Iran to start some trouble in Gaza to provoke Israel into a brutal retaliation, since Netanyahu was already known to be itching for an excuse to go all genocide (as confirmed by the IDF using cluster bombs in excess and blockbusters in civilian-occupied urban areas).
Hamas, emboldened with its new materiel, went hard and Netanyahu was gleeful for the opportunity to massacre more Palestinians, even resort to contrived famine to do it.
All while smart phones on the ground recorded the carnage up close and personal, which leaked to the internet for all to see.
So Hamas is not a military giant, but they played their part with aplomb
They can curb Netanyahu’s capacity to travel, and pressure Israel to vote him out of office, or be thought of as Bibi’s little collective bitch.
Similarly, George W. Bush and his administration can’t leave the US for fear of arrest. Despite the Storm the Hague law, the US won’t be storming the Hague even if ex-presidents stand trial by internal tribubal.
I can’t speak for living like a king but we were able to recently confirmed again the whole lazy proletariat myth is a capitalist fiction. During the COVID-19 lockdown we had furloughed workers with a perfect opportunity to just lounge for months, and they just couldn’t. Healthy adults just can’t couch potato and watch TV for two weeks. When they try, they get cabin fever and start leaning how to widdle wood into bear sculptures. The Great Resignation was driven partially by lockdown hobbies that became lucrative,
I, personally, can couch-potato out for weeks, but at my worst, I have slept for months, getting up only to eat and excrete. I didn’t sleep always; sometimes I’d lie there awake but my inertia would be so great I couldn’t lift a hand. This is avolition a symptom of mental illness, such as major depression. When doctors noticed that I can make like a log for almost a year, I was diagnosed and qualify for disability.
When all your workers are lethargic or crabby or stealing all the nitrous canisters, maybe your workplace is toxic. Maybe the managers aren’t actually managing but acting like children who need to be handled. Or maybe you’re not paying them enough to get out of precarity, which is a major cause of chronic mental illness like major depression.
To me this sounds like a feature to justify recording everything done on the PC in order to phone it back to Big MS.
This reminds me of the period when AAA game companies were trying to mandate persistent online connection as part of DRM, and looked specifically for game mechanics to justify it. It often didn’t work, or worsened the game.
I learned from Jurassic Park that females are default since they’re XX and males are XY, but it turns out that’s just specific to humans, and its reversed in some animals, where others determine sex not based on genes at all.
And Adonai had a consort, Asherah that was actively removed and censored because her culture was dominating.
SCOTUS has specifically chosen to take appeals that did not need to be determined at the federal level, but did anyway in order to define things at a national level. In the aughts and 2010s, things involving law enforcement, and precinct interpretation of the fourth and fifth amendments to the Constitution of the United States often made an appeal to federal levels and were accepted, as were reproductive rights issues (specifically laws that obstructed abortion access).
That said, if we had a supreme court bench pool of one hundred SCOTUS judges, and each case was heard by a handful of them (six to nine is fine) selected by lottery, that would reduce a lot of the problems. It would be difficult to influence enough to steer the court regarding a specific issue, and even if one president appointed five federalist-society shills, it wouldn’t throw the balance of the court as much as McConnell’s and Leo’s shenanigans have. But that’s only good for the next new nation. This one we just have to acknowledge the federal court system is the most corrupt of the three branches of government. Few will lose sleep when they are put against the wall or convicted in the Hague, down to the last office clerk.
Morality, the thing we mythically got from the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, is how we negotiate cooperation, specifically in holding back the predators, parasites, famine, disease and the elements (hot, cold, wet, dry) that are all glad to kill us. With enough cooperation we can survive the -40° poles and the big white bears. With too little cooperation, we’re homeless in own society and are rounded up in concentration camps.
But also we’re not great at this. In fact, we only are good for migratory bands of hunter gatherers, and while we have developed a robust list of egalitarian ethics by which we might maintain a community of tens of millions, generally, those fall to exploitation by those in power (parasitism is the most effective and most common survival strategy), but even our industrialists can’t help themselves and exploit us just enough to stay rich. They are driven to take more and more, and regard their workforce less until the situation becomes untennable. Often an industrial disaster results in discontent and unrest (if not civil war) but if not that, they are gladly polluting our world uninhabitable, dooming even their own legacies and future generations, all for number-go-up.
So, we can see that not only are we instictually driven to cooperate to survive, but those instincts only carry us so far, and even as we see what the rational choice would be to preserve a functional equilibrium, we are driven by feelings not to make that choice. Hence how Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and even Christian bulwarks like Sam Alito and Clarence Thomas (whose jobs are to engage in pure rational thought) can’t help themselves but be total assholes.
The question of existence ( why live? ) has only some intersection with the question of morality ( why be kind? )
On the side of the existential question, some folk find it enough to find a place to fit into society and serve a roll. At least this was the position of Jean-Paul Sartre, hence the notion of existence precedes essence. To me this compares too readily with the notion of interchangeable parts, as our industrialist masters are glad to force us to work for them as a component in their big productivity machine only to be discarded when we wear out. I digress, but maybe we shouldn’t let industrialists dictate the missions of society.
In my experience, all my occupational ideals were discovered to be toxic or driven by racketeering. Most music is stolen by the big labels. Game development is run by executives looking to make microtransaction skinner boxes, and gladly crunch their teams even when doing so has been shown to kill productivity. Navy advancement is based on what rich people and government officials you personally know. And so on. Having talked to others, it seems like there’s a lot of anecdotal evidence that every occupational dream is quashed by grisly realities that are unnecessary but for our love of dominance hierarchy and doing things half-assed to maximize short-term profits. I have a lot of resentment of capitalism and how it’s done in our society.
But I got really crushed once it became evident we weren’t going to respond to the climate crisis in time, if at all, and we expect a population correction, late in my life. It may lead to human extinction in the next couple of centuries, but it absolutely will rend asunder any human culture, so whether I made music or discovered better scientific models or even wrote a sweet novel that was classic material, it wasn’t likely to survive the upcoming global famine.
But this is similar to where Albert Camus was after WWII, recognizing the absolute meaningless of life and the inevitability of death. We all come to this crux, where we have to choose how to proceed from here, knowing that life is pretty awful, pretty meaningless and pretty temporary.
You can kill yourself. It’s where you’re going anyway. (I don’t recommend this mostly because it is really harsh on people close to you and some people that aren’t. Still, our suicide rate here in the states is high thanks to the crappy state of the economy and rising hate politics.)
You can commit philosophical suicide by taking a leap of faith. Christianity offers a personal Jesus and the prospect of eternal life in Heaven, so you don’t have to concern yourself with the grim reality of mortality. That said, all the ministries are a sham that will parasitize you much like any industrialist or employer. Heck, pre-resurrection Jesus had a few things to say about this is the case and one should follow their own path to enlightenment spirituality.
You can deal. Dealing with aplomb (that is, leaning into it and embracing the absurd mission of finding meaning in a meaningless life) is harder than it sounds, but so long as you don’t take either of the other options, you’re actually doing the thing, even if not with grace and poise and a perfect landing.
That said, tacos is as perfectly find a reason to continue onward as any other, an example of a hedonistic approach. I find my cat sometimes provides me with enough cause without further explanation. On the other hand, I do have a desire for my own legacy, not future generations, but of contributing to the body of human knowledge, art and technology, and I can’t be sure anything in my fields of interest are going to be useful once the ecology fully collapses.
Atheism, in my experience, is coming to terms with bad news: We’re going to die. The odds are against our becoming significant in the universe. We’re not even a particularly happy species or society, and while I’d like to imagine we’ll overcome some of these with technology, say some sociological tricks that allow us to curb corruption and move towards egalitarianism, it’s much more likely we’re just going to go extinct, and let some other critter evolve social brains and have a go at reaching into space.
In that regard, religious faith is at hubris that we are bigger fish in a smaller pond, and at best a cope rather than confronting how tiny we microbes are in a vast unending ocean.
This is one of those places where a technology might be beneficial to a communal societies but are dangerous in capitalist ones, since any technology that replaces workers, or substitutes high-paying professional jobs with menial jobs impact survival of the workforce.
I think AI will get better at simulating human creativity, or allowing less-skilled workers produce high-quality results to the point that it will change art much the way desktop publishing revolutionized graphic design (with much resistence from the X-acto generation.
The challenge, IMNSHO is navigating the new technology so it serves society and not just the bunch of capitalists at the top who’d gladly replace us all with robots and let us starve.
When I was a toddler, my dad was one of the mission control guys for the Apollo missions, and my room was decorated with NASA launch vehicle charts dad got from his work.
And I loved it. I thought rockets and space were the bee’s knees.
So I don’t personally see any issue with setting your kid up with jetfighter kitch if that’s what makes them happy.
Syd Mead is one of my gods. I’d hoped during the COVID-19 outbreak we’d get so into masks and screens that we’d see some of Mead’s anonymity helmets, but there was so much resistance. Someone did create a personal environment with filtered airflow, but it was expensive and posh.
The new norms reframe the Catholic Church’s evaluation process by essentially taking off the table whether church authorities will declare a particular vision, stigmata or other seemingly divinely inspired event supernatural....
So are they going as far as to say the Resurrection of Jesus was likely to be ahistorical?
We’re used to a post-Newtonian world being free of ghosts, fairies and divine intervention. But recognizing that their own origins are mythical would be a significant step.
It’s as much admitted to seminaries, just not to the laity.
I’m also glad to let the Roman Catholic Church render itself obsolete and irrelevant. The participation of the USCCB in the Christian nationalist movement, and the Catholic Federalist Society wing of SCOTUS is going to cause a heavy backlash against the entire church, including the Holy See if it continues to push dogma-driven doctrine and further strip civil rights.
It’s really time for religious institutions to resign from their position as the second estate.
It was a fraternity thing in the mid 20th century for members to rotate taking classes for their mascot pet, to accumulate the units necessart order to secure them a degree (not honorary, but potentially fraudulent).
An Alabama principal let a preacher "talk about Jesus" at a mental health assembly (www.friendlyatheist.com)
A public school in Alabama invited a preacher to speak to students about Jesus and lead them in prayer. One reason we know that is because the preacher bragged about how he got away with itonline....
An international institution doing something based for once (sopuli.xyz)
That's all it is. (lemmy.world)
New Windows AI feature records everything you’ve done on your PC (arstechnica.com)
Because of course it rule (pawb.social)
Gig companies spent $224 million to write their own labor law. The state Supreme Court could throw it out (calmatters.org)
Maybe those 20 seconds were because of the lack of getting raises? (lemmy.world)
Tacos. (lemmy.world)
cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/15573986...
adherence to the rule is the 4th law of robotics (lemmy.blahaj.zone)
don't get a dog rule (lemmy.world)
NCD Child-rearing (lemmy.world)
I hope this isn’t a repost
We may clown on him a lot but it's genuinely quite dystopian how much power Elon Musk has. (lemmy.world)
Blade Runner concept art- Syd Mead, gauche on board (1982) (lemmy.world)
The Vatican declares that it can no longer confirm the supernatural... but you can worship it anyway. (apnews.com)
The new norms reframe the Catholic Church’s evaluation process by essentially taking off the table whether church authorities will declare a particular vision, stigmata or other seemingly divinely inspired event supernatural....
Meet Max, the cat receiving an (honorary) doctorate from Vermont State University this weekend (www.vermontpublic.org)
For you MST3K fans, this proves that cats are superior to Nick. Even cats get into Castleton.
New addition, not sure on name yet... (lemmy.world)
New kitten in the family, 2 months old. Not sure on a name yet....