BF2S Forums Religions of the world Thread

Dilbert_X wrote:

SuperJail Warden wrote:

You are right but if cousin marriage was a part of American civilization nobody would think it is weird if I asked my cousin out.

If cousin marriage was a part of American civilization you'd all be too retarded to think - like most of Pakistan.

marrying cousins was part of american culture for most of its history. britain too. it's typical bougeois family-clan type stuff. victorians and before were always marrying cousins or second cousins.

it's still legal in a large number of american states.

Is this the right thread for this?

JFK-obsessed QAnon cultists set off alarms with ominous chatter: 'We have to experience physical death'
https://www.rawstory.com/michael-brian- … 655776085/

Fuck.

I don't think any of us had any idea at the time.

Who knew that a bunch of chortling internet trolls would eventually shake the country down to its foundations? I wonder how many of them predicted that a death cult would be built out of their big joke?

Boomers still obsess over the Kennedy assassination for some reason.

The republicans obviously hated the Kennedy family just as they've blindly hated every other democrat president and politician.
Retards make everything personal.

Well its a fact the Kennedys were lizard people, but the republicans need to prove democrats are genetically evil and always have been.

Personally I think the idea of political dynasties is anti-democratic the same as royal families - we're back to lizard people again.

Ready or Not was a fun film.

probably a good point. the history channel and all that 'factual' cable programming really veered off the road into nonsense in the mid-aughts. i mean, even before then it was just 95% hitler and the nazis, anyway, which is kind of weird when you think about it in terms of the mass psychology of their viewer demographics.

this was a meme to internet-literate people but it's pretty much the paranoiac, fantasy-lit imagination of the QAnon mouth-breathers.

Personally I think the idea of political dynasties is anti-democratic the same as royal families

political dynasties arise when democratic processes ossify and inequality/stratification starts to set into the body-politic. same thing happened as rome went from a republic to an imperium. being the pre-eminent global power with an economy 5x bigger than just about any near-competitor will do that to a free country; too much money, too much power and political prerogative.

ironically, though, you're against any radically egalitarian or 'bottom up' politics. you don't want political dynasties, but you do want only 'the right sort' of people to be represented and in power. in a country that is majority non-white, still being sniffy about migrants or non-WASP culture generally seems like a pretty funny way to be 'anti-elites' like the kennedys.

a self-elected elite of technocrats who all went to the right engineering college or business school and claim to have all the answers to every political question in the universe isn't paticularly 'participatory' or 'democractic', either, by the way.

uziq wrote:

probably a good point. the history channel and all that 'factual' cable programming really veered off the road into nonsense in the mid-aughts. i mean, even before then it was just 95% hitler and the nazis, anyway, which is kind of weird when you think about it in terms of the mass psychology of their viewer demographics.

The jews are never going to stop telling the holocaust is the most important thing to happen in the last 5,000 years, the Kennedy stuff is going to get pulled along in its wake. "Somebody died 50 years ago! Here's another hot take! We interview more people who weren't there and don't know anyone who was!"

ironically, though, you're against any radically egalitarian or 'bottom up' politics. you don't want political dynasties, but you do want only 'the right sort' of people to be represented and in power. in a country that is majority non-white, still being sniffy about migrants or non-WASP culture generally seems like a pretty funny way to be 'anti-elites' like the kennedys.

Not said that, what I do think is people from corrupt anti-democratic tribal cultures shouldn't be in positions of power - they'll use it to benefit their own tribe. Applies to Etonians and Ghanaians equally.

a self-elected elite of technocrats who all went to the right engineering college or business school and claim to have all the answers to every political question in the universe isn't paticularly 'participatory' or 'democractic', either, by the way.

Might be better than what we have now.
Don't most political theories, Marxism, Adam Smith etc advocate for technocratic governance?

If I had to guess I'd say boomers are driving and manipulating this and the remainder are being sucked along.
I bet the Q guy is a boomer angry that the taxes he got reduced aren't now paying all his medical bills.

Same with Al Qaeda, some miserable old guy angry with the world suckers younger people into dying for a cause they don't even understand.

It has always been thus.

marxism advocated for a dictatorship of the proletariat, its kind it’s core idea, the idea that there should be a transitional ‘soviet’ stage made of technocrats who can better manage and enable the transition was one of the developments of leninism. which isn’t a surprising development when you consider how woefully inadequate the much-vaunted ‘proletariat hero’ was in tsarist russia, which even by the standards of the time represented some of the worst-deprived feudal serfs in the world (the state of the peasantry in russia, in particular in comparison to her european neighbours, was a perennial concern for 19th century tsars).

and those experiments in societies led by experts, scientists, engineers, technicians, etc., didn’t really go very well, did they? avoidable famines and mass death, runaway inflation and worthless currencies, incompetent centralized supplies and inferior mass-produced goods made to quota. neat! what’s the engineer’s response? ‘hmm, if only we include a few more variables in our modelling we can do better next time’.

society and politics are not ‘problems’ with logical ‘solutions’ and rational ‘outcomes’.  this is one of the main criticisms – albeit a superficial and shallow one – levelled at marx: that his teleological vision is sometimes tantamount to a sort of lame determinism, and that history can be properly understood as a vast mechanism, which if only we could peer inside and perceive … etc. well, human societies are many things plus brute mechanism, and the mechanics tend to fuck it up when they underestimate the other stuff. 

economics has fallen prey to the same delusions of omnipotence and omniscience, especially in the last century as they tried to ground themselves in hard maths and clothe themselves in a professorial mien. all those models and all those equations and yet the economy still seems to be a system with so many multidynamical processes, including its fair share of human folly, fear and irrationality, that the whole thing falls into sheer disequilibrium once every 3 generations and wipes out the bottom 80%'s finances, leading to global conflagration and war. ‘we just need better experts!’ you cry. most of the worst depredations of the 20th century were dreamt up by economists from the chicago school armed with 'superior' perceptions about how the world-system should be organized 'rationally'. engineers, economists, political scientists, etc, can constitute tribes in themselves, call them 'secular tribes' or 'cults of rationality' or whatever you want – just as prey to self-preservation, bias unconscious or otherwise, etc.

modern and future societies will only be increasingly pluralistic, and we need representative governments and a wide balance of knowledge as a result. engineers don’t possess some master key to the universe, even amongst scientists they’re a fairly limited bunch, and they certainly haven’t divinated some deeper level of understanding into humans and human societies generally. engineers and computer scientists can only try and remake society in their own image, that is, with their own presumptions about how humans work and what constitutes ‘the good’: there’s nothing in mech-eng or elec-eng that points a way in this stuff. you may as well suggest that a cadre of art historians would know how to run society because they’ve spent centuries studying the human passions and human motivation.

any elite which has consolidated its power long ago, that is, its economic ascendancy and security, will soon invent a whole panoply of codes, mannerisms, customs and ‘distinctions’ (à la bourdieu) to ringfence them off from hoi polloi. that in europe this takes the form of expensively educated people who are familiar with roman history, medieval latin grammar books, hunting and boating regattas is besides the point. they are surface execresences not substantive root causes. their outward appearance and ‘intellectual’ backgrounds are just the chosen pursuits of the otherwise idle rich.

Last edited by uziq (2021-11-22 17:53:05)

uziq wrote:

probably a good point. the history channel and all that 'factual' cable programming really veered off the road into nonsense in the mid-aughts. i mean, even before then it was just 95% hitler and the nazis, anyway, which is kind of weird when you think about it in terms of the mass psychology of their viewer demographics.

this was a meme to internet-literate people but it's pretty much the paranoiac, fantasy-lit imagination of the QAnon mouth-breathers.

Personally I think the idea of political dynasties is anti-democratic the same as royal families

political dynasties arise when democratic processes ossify and inequality/stratification starts to set into the body-politic. same thing happened as rome went from a republic to an imperium. being the pre-eminent global power with an economy 5x bigger than just about any near-competitor will do that to a free country; too much money, too much power and political prerogative.

ironically, though, you're against any radically egalitarian or 'bottom up' politics. you don't want political dynasties, but you do want only 'the right sort' of people to be represented and in power. in a country that is majority non-white, still being sniffy about migrants or non-WASP culture generally seems like a pretty funny way to be 'anti-elites' like the kennedys.

a self-elected elite of technocrats who all went to the right engineering college or business school and claim to have all the answers to every political question in the universe isn't particularly 'participatory' or 'democratic', either, by the way.

This image has been on my hard drive since college for this very reason.

The documentary channel stuff becoming increasingly psuedo-science and outright fantasy has been a long time, FWP pet peeve of mine.

What the Bleep Do We Know!?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_the_ … e_Know!%3F

Scientists who have reviewed What the Bleep Do We Know!? have described distinct assertions made in the film as pseudoscience.[11][12] Lisa Randall refers to the film as "the bane of scientists".

You almost have to see it to get the full effect. Watching this with people who are leaned forward taking it very seriously must be a distinctly uncomfortable experience.

Spicing up your conspiracy theories and pseudo-sciences with with random factoids and occasionally scientific lingo doesn't really true your message.

There's this fish scientist guy on youtube (AVNJ) who's been trending for awhile on reaction videos like watchmojo, etc., "'true facts' about the ocean" sea monster garbo. Had a good laugh at a couple. Interestingly, he's started a series on ichthyology I've been meaning to get around to. The kind of content I wish the site was better known for, that I usually look for on Great Courses and so on.

What is pewdiepie up to now, 100 million subs? 200?