Sunday School

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

Many republicans are just realizing that they actually really do like Bud Light after all.

Bahrain: Open discussion of religion must not be criminalised.

Fewer Latinos in the US identify as Catholic. The same is happening in the Philippines.

Do you have a right to miss work to honor the Sabbath? The Supreme Court will decide.

DeSantis appoints a judge from a Religious-Right group.

Ken Ham still thinks the Bible is based upon factual information.

Federal judge says Christian teacher has no right to misgender students.

Colombia’s devout Catholic head of police is fired after admitting using exorcisms to fight crime.

Arizona court upholds clergy privilege in child abuse case.

I swear that I am thinking about a campaign to get the Bible banned from courthouses and replaced with nothing. Swearing an oath to an imaginary God is more likely to get you acquitted in court.

World of Woo: Educating people on how to critically analyze information will reduce conspiratorial thinking.  A deeper dig here.  Indonesia is taking a good approach to teaching fact checking skills.

Environment: Here’s why downpours in Florida just wouldn’t stop.

Satan clubs should be allowed in schools.

Game-changing mRNA vaccine is 100% effective against the plague and other deadly bacteria.

Einstein’s most famous quote is totally misunderstood.

Long Reads: Medieval manuscripts blog from the British Library.  What are reasonable A.I. fears?

Sunday Book Club: I am going to reread it to see how I re-experience it.

Some photographs taken last week.

While you are waiting for the kettle to boil……

Coffee Break Video:  Sam Harris debunks Jordan Peterson’s postmodern Christ. This one is for those with a technical interest in A.I. – Sparks of AGI: early experiments with GPT-4. The Joe Rogan AI Experience with Donald Trump.

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

Have a great week everyone!

 

[StregaModerator]

Thanks, Reg!!

[_Robert_Participant]

RE:Game-changing mRNA vaccine is 100% effective against the plague and other deadly bacteria.

I recall a few years ago right here on this forum we were discussing how mRNA tech and other genetic engineering breakthroughs were gonna be a game changer for so many health issues going forward.

[AutumnParticipant]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:

Federal judge says Christian teacher has no right to misgender students.

Kluge initially tried to say that his objection to using the correct names and pronouns for trans students was that transgender people face a high suicide rate.

What’s sad is this sort of tedious concern trolling gets way more mileage than it really should. That there are people who will never, for whatever reason, accept trans people/ identities is something I can live with for the most part. But the endless, exhausting bullshit they spew to make themselves out as our tough love benefactors makes my metaphorical soul cringe.

That said, I get we are oppressing him with our pronouns in this case, so maybe I should send him something as a consolation. Case of Bud Lite, maybe?

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Fellow Unbelievers,

Today, April 19th, is a pivotal day in the history of human freedom. It is the anniversary of the Battle of Lexington and Concord in what became The United States of America in 1775 and The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in Poland in 1943. Two instances where bad guys with guns were met with good guys and gals with guns!

Revolution: Lexington & Concord

Uprising Trailer

[jakelafortParticipant]

Oh hey Enco.

I went to high school in Concord. Bunch of snobs and elitists. Broad brush knockout!

Got lost running around Walden Pond. Ate an apricot outside home of Mary Louise Alcott. Saw the Concord bridge where the two sides fought. Witnessed a jackass brandish his weapon to Mayflower descendant Myles Standish. Nickname Duck. I got nuttin good to say about it. Nostaliga neuralgia.

[DavisModerator]

To be honest, I don’t particularly find the British at the beginning of the American revolution overly bad in comparison to nearly all other revolutions that happened. You will note that Canada, Australia and New Zealand all peacefully became independent without violent turmoil, with a smooth transition to democracy. Also, America was hardly the object of vicious oppression as other colonies were such as in Africa. In fact, the very beginning of the American revolution started with acts of terrorism against the British, something I have noted people tend to see as heroic when it happened by fledgling Americans but bad when done anywhere else in the world now [p.s. its almost all bad imho].

Try to reshake up your narratives. Good guys with guns fighting bad guys with guns? Are you sure?

[_Robert_Participant]

Davis wrote:

To be honest, I don’t particularly find the British at the beginning of the American revolution overly bad in comparison to nearly all other revolutions that happened. You will note that Canada, Australia and New Zealand all peacefully became independent without violent turmoil, with a smooth transition to democracy. Also, America was hardly the object of vicious oppression as other colonies were such as in Africa. In fact, the very beginning of the American revolution started with acts of terrorism against the British, something I have noted people tend to see as heroic when it happened by fledgling Americans but bad when done anywhere else in the world now [p.s. its almost all bad imho]. Try to reshake up your narratives. Good guys with guns fighting bad guys with guns? Are you sure?

Taxing tea is not the worst injustice in the world. I think it was just a case of timing, a wave of change. People were becoming more literate. Decided they were done with kings and queens and birthrights in general; it was just time to move on.

[jakelafortParticipant]

The British wanted to be reimbursed for expenses incurred in French and Indian war. I am not sure if those same expenses were taxed on British subjects at home. British also wanted colonists to cool their jets in regard to territorial expansion. It was inevitable after a time that the colonists would want independence. Also inevitable that the British would see it as just another colony and fuck them for wanting to be independent. As causes for revolution go i have to side with Davis.

A little tip from your uncle Larry. If anybody ever travels to Saratoga Springs NY there is a really cool restaurant called Olde Bryan Inn. It was founded a few years before the American Revolution and was patronized by both revolutionaries and colonists. It still has some of the original wood. Food is pretty good too.

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Robert, Davis, and Jake,

It was not all about tea (even though, parenthetically, it’s not nice to screw around with people’s caffeine, especially early in the morning. ☕🍵🧋🥤🫖 🤬)

It was about the “long trail of abuses” by The British Crown detailed in The Declaration of Independence. Much of that informed and inspired the limits on Government contained later in The U.S. Constitution and The Bill of Rights.

There was one such abuse by The British Crown that Thomas Jefferson wanted to put in the text, but it didn’t make it because the Delegates from South Carolina and Georgia opposed it and The Declaration was agreed to be Unanimous. That abuse by The British Crown was as follows:

He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he has obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the Liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.

In other words, Jefferson condemned The British Crown for first bringing slavery and the slave trade to the Colonies, then using the slaves as cat’s-paws to attack the Colonists by offering slaves the very freedom which The British Crown deprived of the slaves in exchange for attacking the Colonists…and which The British Crown did while claiming the blessing of Christianity.

For every finger of blame pointed at the Founders over slavery, the other four of that hand should also point at The British Crown.

Were there things that I would have wanted done different in the American Revolution? Sure.

Instead of throwing privately-owned tea into Boston Harbor, I would have tried to get the merchants on our side. “Pssst! Mister Dutch East India! Your job’s hard enough without being King George III’s involuntary tax collector and submitting your ship and manifest at his will. Why not join with The Continental Congress, shirk the tax, and we’ll drink your tea ’til we piss and puke our guts out! Mister Hancock could tell you some sly routes to take to avoid the British fleets too.”

Instead of calling the Natives into derision, I would have tried to get them on our side too. “Hey, Chief!
You know those guys who did you dirt in the French and Indian War? Well, they did us dirt too and strung us along for the ride. If you can help us, maybe we can set things right for you and your people.”

And finally:

“Cato. Hera. I have some news. The King’s Redcoats are coming and they mean nothing good for any of us! You shouldn’t have to be in the middle of this if you don’t want to be. It’s not your fault, you were brought here without your consent.”

“So, in the interest of doing the right thing, living up to our ideals, and in leaving the Redcoats nothing and nobody to plunder and destroy, The Continental Congress says you’re free.”

“You can stay and join in our reindeer games as equal Patriots, with equal rights and equal obligations to respect the rights of others, or we have ships that can take you anywhere you are welcome, as capacity and boarding permits. Rest assured, accomodations will be much better this time.”

“And if we win, you are welcome back under whatever policy we adopt on immigration. And if we don’t win, well, heh! it’s just more centuries of darkness for everybody and we probably won’t be around to complain or commiserate. We will respect and understand your decision no matter what it is. What do you say?”

[jakelafortParticipant]

Enco, wake up and smell the tea.

Jefferson’s moral outrage at slavery was a cause of the revolution? The guy who owned hundreds of slaves was so pissed at the reprehensible introduction of slavery into the colonies that he knew it would be impossible to resist so he didn’t. If only those colonists, british subjects, hadn’t been introduced to that peculiar institution they would not have done it themselves? That would have given them more time to exploit the indigenous population. They were quite skilled in decimating, dehumanizing, and murdering natives. But ya know, SCRUPLES! If only…

Free enterprise proponents or libertarians have a bit of a conundrum. Slavery is what people do when they can get away with it, when no government stands up to them by criminalizing it. So on the one hand no government interference in our blessed commerce. On the other hand slavery is a restraint on trade by permitting humans to be dehumanized and become property. They can’t purchase or sell anything if they are property. What is a libertarian to do or think. The US had one new state after another and the greand issue of whether it would come in as a free state. But i am sure if only the Brits had not introduced it the colonists would not have gotten dirty hands.

The fledgling state needed limitations on govenmental power so they had a little revolution-that very trail of abuses led to the trail of tears.

[_Robert_Participant]

Jake, that’s a valid point IMHO. A clear case of economics over morality. The new agrarian nation benefitted immensely from slave labor. You just can’t let commerce do as it will. It has a myopic focus. A governing body has to temper it, but if the governing body partakes in the profits, well it just never works. It’s not that complicated really. The economies of scale inherent in goods production and finance drives towards monopolies. So much for your free market without regulation.

[DavisModerator]

Everything is motivated by incentives, with economics being a massive incentive. Democracy doesn’t come about without something else driving it. The standard narrative that, oh no, British overlords bad, pioneering founders good…voila…democracy is childish. It came because the founders had everything to gain politically and economically by starting a violent and deadly war against the British (which by the way had absolutely no guarantee of working out despite the bloodshed). The only reason that democracy did not quickly collapse is that the economic benefits of becoming a tyrant weren’t strong enough at the time to maintain sufficient support.

While it is certainly great that America became a “slightly” democratic country which helped propel revolutions already in the works in other countries, it is ridiculous to blindly swallow the whole thirst for democracy narrative…wave a wand (and a few unfortunate deaths) and something exceptional was born. It’s just one more set of men doing something that met their own political/economic interests, only in this (and a few other cases) it was somewhat beneficial for the wider population (for example, non-slaves, non-women, non-indentured servants, non-destitute people).

I would, if I were American, focus a lot more on its trajectory towards a failed democracy, unhealthy set of human rights and appalling lack of support for the destitute and those in need.

[UnseenParticipant]

Davis wrote:

Everything is motivated by incentives

=”Everything is incentivized by incentives.” Tautologize much? LOL

[Author]

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