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Messages - redwallzyl

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106
General Discussion / Re: AmeriPol thread
« on: July 21, 2018, 07:49:52 pm »
Active hostage situation at a Trader Joes in LA.

Guess now we have to arm the Trader Joes' staff members alongside our teachers.
Will we ever have enough good guys with guns to finally end the violence?
Arizona Senate candidate who killed his mother supports 'good guys' with guns

107
General Discussion / Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« on: July 20, 2018, 11:01:06 pm »
Probably also cultural differences. Stuff that would be considered lewd here can be considered comedic there. Totally different moral culture surrounding that kind of stuff.

108
General Discussion / Re: Railgun and Spirituality Discussion
« on: July 20, 2018, 10:44:01 pm »
I'unno, you might not be able to get away with anything living, depending on how you look at it. There's some radical pacifist groups that consider basically everything alive to be sacred, iirc, so both talbukian gnarldoggo and angler fish would be included. Might have better luck with inanimate/unliving stuff, maybe.

There are sacred places, which tend to be geographical features though unless associated with things people built.

From a scientific point of view, there isn't going to be a clear "line" anywhere between pre-hominids and hominids. There was nothing special that happened at that generation compared to any other generation.

From a cognitive evolution point of view however, some sort of ritual phenomena probably started growing at some point, perhaps as a group bonding thing. However, it's probably not right to call that the point of "first hominids" because all the things we take to define hominids probably started at quite different times, all gradually.
Fun fact I saw on a nature show. Chimpanzees may 'worship' certain trees or locations. They take turns throwing rocks at the tree til all of them have done it, then move on. Could be the formation of proto-religious rituals.

Yeah, theres pretty good evidence of proto-culture and proto-religion among some non-human primates, so, theres probably no clear line anywhere as it would have been a gradual development.
There was this really interesting documentary that I watched about Baboons. The Baboons were fairly normal Baboons, that is to say dicks. Then all the assholeish Baboons at the top of the social ladder died due to disease. The whole culture of the group permanently changed. Suddenly they were all nice to each other and even when new Baboons came in to the group acting like assholes they now nice Baboons reformed them to be nice as well. So yes, primates do have massive behavioral influences from what you might call proto-culture. As a side note this is well known in the biological anthropological community at this point. That behavior is heavily effected by past influences even down generations. I had a professor who wanted to try and find some monkeys free from human behavioral influences in an uninhabited part of the Amazon until he realized that there had been people living their in the far past.

109
General Discussion / Re: Railgun and Spirituality Discussion
« on: July 20, 2018, 08:53:03 am »
I suppose that the earliest humans were irreligious.
as far as we know they were shamanistic.

110
General Discussion / Re: AmeriPol thread
« on: July 19, 2018, 10:35:40 am »
Conservatives and Republicans are two different things. Conservative is a general philosophy while Republicans are a political party with a set of positions that have very little to do with the conservative philosophy. They like to pretend that everything they do is "conservative" by default, warping Americas image of what conservatism actually is. A conservative can easily be a Democrat, I'm of the opinion that at Heart Obama was a conservative, a conservative that whole heartedly embraces the ideas of old liberalism, that is the inherent goodness of democracy, that philosophy of democracy, and slow, non radical change is at the heart of what he believes. Yet despite this he is painted with absurd brushes by a Republican party that is not actually conservative anymore but simply a power structure attached to a set of specific policies and agendas. There is no longer any conservative philosophy behind the Republican party. The Democrats now contain most of the conservatives and the liberals now which is probably why it has so much trouble.

111
General Discussion / Re: Things that made you sad today thread.
« on: July 17, 2018, 02:09:45 pm »
Quote
I just feel like a very small and mostly ineffectual part of a large and random universe right now.

Any amount of years of flawless dilligence can be lost in a splitsecond. Anybody who thinks they own their success to nothing but their efforts is just arrogant.
This, this a thousand times. So many people do not understand this concept. Luck is by far the most important thing for success.

112
General Discussion / Re: Railgun and Spirituality Discussion
« on: July 16, 2018, 06:28:56 pm »
The pope has not had the declarative power over policy for a long time. An influence sure but that power protestants imagine he has was broken centuries ago. There is however a mechanism to make large scale decisions that must be accepted, an ecumenical counsel. That has been the accepted mode of resolving disputes in the church since the beginning. When large scale reforms happen it's usually through agreements that come out of counsels.
Thanks for the mention of councils. Although the Pope does have a major role in ecumenical councils, since he's the one that usually calls for the council.
I'm a fan of church history. It's a very interesting subject.

113
General Discussion / Re: Railgun and Spirituality Discussion
« on: July 16, 2018, 06:01:25 pm »
They have a long history of being controversial. But really there is no other way to get a major change in policy as the church can not just tell people to do stuff it needs to convince them. That is both a strength and a weakness. like a highly decentralized government. It's sort of how I imagine a huge interstellar federation might function.

114
General Discussion / Re: Railgun and Spirituality Discussion
« on: July 16, 2018, 05:23:23 pm »
I don't really know enough about Catholicism to have an in depth discussion, but I can say that I heard a coworker (in the United States) get into a heated discussion with another coworker about the pope's authority over him as a Catholic.  Evidently, as far as he's concerned the pope has no authority over his religious beliefs whatsoever, which came as a surprise to me and pretty much everyone else present.

Admittedly, having grown up in a Protestant community, just about everything in Catholicism seems mysterious, but as an outsider I was under the impression that the Catholic church had a very strong notion of religious authority, where the pope could (in grossly oversimplified terms) say one day that women could be priests and that would be that.  That's opposed to most Protestant denominations, where there's almost no central authority, and any individual church can always decide to just do things their own way if they don't care about leaving the conference they're part of (if they're even part of one).

Clearly, this is not a correct understanding of how Catholicism works.
Your coworker is probably exaggerating things to make a point, but he's largely correct (Disclaimer: I'm not a Catholic, I just read a lot about Christian religious history, and know some Catholics). The main power of the pope is that he's the head of a religious denomination and bureaucracy that over a billion people are members of. So what he says about religious matters is taken seriously, and he has some control over who gets appointed bishop and money matters. But the Catholic Church isn't and never was a one-man show, so there are plenty of people under the Pope who are also influential and counsel the pope and have their own jobs, like Vatican treasurer, or archbishop of Los Angeles, etc. So your coworker may or may not pay attention to what the pope is doing, but if he attends a church, his priest probably pays attention. And like Teneb and Grim Portent, said, Catholicism is not a monolith, and is very different in different places, because that's what happens with people.

There is a doctrine of Papal infallibility that says the Pope can make statements that are without error, or ex cathedra. But those are pretty rare and there's limits over what this can be applied to. Wikipedia cites a list of 7 or so papal documents that are considered infallible, with the caveat that its not a comprehensive list. But the most recent of the 7 was from 1950. I think this is what Arcvasti is talking about.

I know pope Francis has been getting a lot of flack from conservative Catholics in the United States, some of whom are part of the Religious Right, because he's too liberal for them (mainly over the issue of divorced Catholics). I've also seen criticism of him for not doing more about reforming the papacy to prevent corruption and covering up sexual abuse, but I don't know enough about that to make a judgement on that.

Again, I'm also not a Catholic, so if any of this is wrong, feel free to correct me.
The pope has not had the declarative power over policy for a long time. An influence sure but that power protestants imagine he has was broken centuries ago. There is however a mechanism to make large scale decisions that must be accepted, an ecumenical counsel. That has been the accepted mode of resolving disputes in the church since the beginning. When large scale reforms happen it's usually through agreements that come out of counsels.

115
General Discussion / Re: AmeriPol thread
« on: July 16, 2018, 04:56:21 pm »
I feel that future training for diplomats will consist of a list of things Trump has done with 'never do this' printed over it in big red letters.

116
General Discussion / Re: AmeriPol thread
« on: July 15, 2018, 02:31:12 pm »
Medical knowledge is irrelevant, because if god intends for you to survive, you will.  Right?
God helps those who helps themselves. That's Matthew 25:45 right? No...?
Fairly sure that is not in the bible.

117
You could also turn the argument around and use the Protestant work ethic as the reason Americas are so against a welfare state.

118
General Discussion / Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« on: July 14, 2018, 02:38:37 pm »
I'm not sure why people find it hard to grasp the difference between gender and sex. The former is a cultural category and the latter is biological category. You can associate any group of behaviors with gender depending on where and when but sex does not change outside of physical alteration.

119
General Discussion / Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« on: July 14, 2018, 01:30:59 pm »
I thought the whole point of transgender-ness was that you become a different gender. Not that you become identifiable as a third-party trans gender, but a trans-man is female. Ergo, a woman playing the role is poyfect.

People who want to be some non-existent "gender" are more likely to be some sort of middle-class try-hards rather than actual people with gender dysmorphia. The problem happens when something like that becomes trendy, then you get douchebags going on about being nano-gender or pico-gender just so they can claim to have a slice of that pie - note that it's almost always white middle class ppl who claim to be those weird "pico" genders and having "demi" sexuality. e.g. boring urban cis people jumping on the bandwagon with just one toe.

"Demisexual" is the clearest bullshit. It's a way for otherwise completely uninteresting people to claim they have a queer sexuality and/or gender identity when they clearly do not. "demi-sexual" means you only sleep with people you're really into. Totally breaking out of the mold there, guys! What complete try-hard morons ... that's just called old-fashioned regular dating. We used to (still do) just call that "not being slutty". "Not being slutty" is a gender identity now, it seems, on par with the oppression faced by gays and transgender people!
It also aids the opposition in casting the LGBTQ movement as being about people like that. We right now have two main categories, those being male and female. It is quite an established thing for there to be a third gender in some cultures and generally culture defines theses categories. The third sits in between the main binary and so upsets people of a traditionalist bent (traditional for their cultures at least). A person does not choose where in this they are. The simply are. So when someone comes along and proclaims that they are some other weird thing it both undermines the actual people in the third category and gives ammunition to traditionalists who use them to cast the entire movement as just people coming up with bullshit to make themselves special. I do wish that I had read more anthropological literature on gender in culture. I'm sure it would be really interesting.

120
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-44816025

Concerning amounts of violence in northern Ireland.

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