Removed by mod

Removed by mod

Any ideology that bans books is self-evidently intellectually and philosophically bankrupt.

That word “overt” isn’t there by accident.

There’s a significant difference between an oligarchic kleptocracy that has to pretend to be a representative democracy and an oligarchic kleptocracy that doesn’t have to bother pretending to be anything else.

I assume it’s going to go until World War III, and until the US is an overt kleptocratic police state.

Really.

rogue state

noun

1. state or nation acting outside of the accepted international norms and policies.

Israel is a rogue state.

There actually is a statistical correlation between conservative, anti-trans political affiliation and a preference for transgender porn, and Texas leads the nation in searches for transgender porn.

Source

No - probably not.

Religion, just in and of itself, isn’t really the problem. It’s just the most notable example of the underlying problem, which is probably best summed up as aggressive tribalism.

People have a compulsive desire for self-affirmation - for assurance that they embody whatever qualities they consider the indicators of “good” people. And by far the easiest way for people to assure themselves of that is to associate those qualities with a label and self-apply that label. That gives them a fellowship of label-wearers who are invested in the same belief, which establishes a feedback loop in which they all assure each other of how [good/right/strong/smart/etc.] they are, and a ready-made set of outsiders they can individually and collectively condemn. And that last is the real problem - since few if any people truly embody the qualities they wish to believe they do, the easiest and most effective way to assure themselves they do is to focus on some designated set of others and on the assertion that they fail to possess those qualities. That allows people to assure themselves that they are at least more [good/right/strong/smart/etc.] than these other people over there.

That’s clearly a toxic and antagonistic dynamic that really just serves to divide people up into warring factions, and since it’s at least somewhat irrational yet crucial to people’s self-affirming self-images, it’s a thing that easily gets entrenched and, whenever possible, codified, so that it can be forcibly imposed.

Again, religion is certainly the most common and historically destructive vehicle for that, but it’s far from the only one. Most notably, it’s also the dynamic underlying virtually all ideology and a great deal of philosophy, not to mention a great many less significant distinctions, ranging from sexual preference to diet to sports fandom.

Now - in the first place, I would say that it would not have been possible to have a world without religion, since the practical purpose of religion is to provide answers to questions for which there’s insufficient evidence or knowledge to support nominally legitimate answers, and that lack of evidence and knowledge was an unavoidable part of our history. From the moment that somebody wondered what that big bright thing up in the sky was and somebody else made up an answer for them, religion was inevitable.

Beyond that though - if we were to imagine a world in which religion somehow never came to be, we’d just have had a world in which people would’ve focused that much more on the other ways in which they divide themselves against themselves, since that desire for self-affirmation exists anyway.

And truth be told, I actually think that’s part of the problem with our current world - that a great many people have just shifted from what would in the past been a self-affirming faith in a religion to a self-affirming faith in an ideology or philosophy or political affiliation or some other tribal distinction - that much of what we’re seeing today is the same toxicity just based on more secular divisions.

Not that religion has become less of a problem - what it’s lost in overall market share, it’s undeniably gained in the fervor and aggression of its remaining adherents, but it’s also been joined by a wide range of other divisions, each destructive in the same general ways, even if not necessarily to the same degree.

As always, all one needs to do is pretend that Trump is an unusually tall and bald five-year-old, and what he says and does makes perfect sense.

Unfortunately, I can’t claim it - I lifted it from another poster here.

But yeah - it’s easily the best name I’ve seen yet.

So who’s going to lose more “active users” - truth.social or Vichy Twitter?

Of course he wants immunity for cops - he dreams of the day when he’ll have his own murder squads and be able to simply have anyone who might dare to oppose him killed.

And so do his supporters.

And so do cops.

And just the other day, the Israelis were wringing their hands over the fact that 11 Israeli soldiers died in one day, but here they are, right back to killing Palestinian civilians at many times that rate, pretty much every single day.

It’s as if they’ve made sociopathy official policy.

Trump is owned by Russia.

It really is just that simple - Putin and his oligarch cronies have bought and paid for him.

Israel has rather obviously been using the attention on Gaza as cover for stepping up their efforts in the West Bank, even going so far as distributing automatic weapons to the illegal settlers, with which the settlers then entirely unsurprisingly went on a murderous rampage.

Just another aspect of the profound evil of Zionism.

Seriously - how can any person be so brazenly and thoroughly warped?

I can only assume that, like so many of the fabulously wealthy, she’s profoundly mentally ill, such that she really can’t grasp the enormous human cost that fulfilling her petty, selfish and ultimately pointless desires would entail. It can only be the case that she genuinely can’t grasp the fact that the millions of people who would be made to suffer or die for this are actual people - actual beings with lives and loved ones who are every bit as important to them as hers are to her.

It’s either that or she’s genuinely evil, in the purest sense of the word, and on a scale the world has rarely seen.

So which is it Ms. Adelson? Are you insane or simply evil? There’s absolutely no doubt - none at all - that it’s one or the other.

So basically the US government is a gigantic Trump - rising up in self-righteous fury at the very idea that anyone might dare to charge them for the crimes they’ve brazenly committed.

I can’t imagine what it must be like to be so morally bankrupt.

Clearly, they know that what they’re doing in Gaza is evil, and they know that the only hope they have of evading the entirely justified condemnation of the rest of the world is to hide it.

History will not judge them kindly. No matter what they do, they’re not going to be able to hide the evidence of their evil forever.

No surprise there.

Israel’s actions in Gaza are morally indefensible.

So its defenders cannot, and for the most part don’t even bother to try to, sincerely engage with criticism.

Instead, they rely on diversions, misrepresentations, character assassination, censorship, intimidation, harassment and violence, simply because that’s all they have.