A lot of people hold awful opinions and do awful things, and then deploy precisely the "I'm not doing this BECAUSE I'm an atheist, I just happen to BE an atheist because I'm rational and logical and care about having beliefs backed by evidence, which is how you know my bigotry is acceptable" defense
You're not wrong, exactly, but it doesn't follow that, because we don't think the political consequences of doing the right thing will be positive, our leaders should therefore do the wrong thing which has a lot of historical precedent of causing even worse consequences.
The idea that a person becomes less human the more they are listened to is kinda silly. We all need to remember that the people who have a lot of people listening to them are, in fact, still people. Forgetting that is, in many ways, the problem.
The idea that we may be in worse shape today, and not just on one particular area of discourse but instead on everything we write about, is terrifying. I find the prospect of being unable to trace ANY original sources of knowledge so scary it's hard to describe.
The widely accepted method is the "criteria of authenticity," which has been demonstrated to be logically fallacious and basically useless, but is nevertheless used because nobody the community respects has come up with an alternative they like. So we can basically know nothing with certainty.
Early Christian literature, the New Testament specifically, is famously known as the most untrustworthy, altered, manipulated, selectively edited, nigh irreparably compromised literary corpus in ancient history. Finding authentic tradition in it is a problem so thorny that there's no good method.
LINK ROT: 38% webpages that existed in 2013 were no longer available 10 years later.
Even among pages that existed in 2021, 22% no longer accessible just two years later. This is often because individual page was deleted or removed on otherwise functional website.
anyone else notice that the west took a turn for the worse once the concept of signaling one’s own social virtue became derogatory, almost as if cynically deriding all displays of charity and good will is indicative of a deeply cynical and nihilistic society capable of collaborating in genocide
her advocacy for Palestinians doesn't bother me nearly as much as she is so desperately doing all this as an actual act of transparent virtue signaling, to fill the absence she has in depth of character
The opposition to that party has a robust slate of young, vibrant, thoughtful, charismatic candidates at many levels, but insists on suppressing and limiting them in favor of candidates and strategies that worked 30-40 years ago, which are failures today but feel familiar.
One party has had a single presidential candidate for a decade, and loyalty to that candidate is the primary determining factor for every lower office in the party, and that candidate has been clearly mentally unfit the entire time.
"You know what ideas we're gonna try to make your life better? Everything we can think of. Keep what works, stop doing what doesn't. Pretty sure we'll hit some bangers by trying everything, though. The rich guys ain't gonna like it, and I welcome their hatred."
