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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 8th, 2023

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  • It isn’t the same. For one, the Supreme Court ruled only this year the the president has nearly king-like powers and immunity – which was only made possible because of the far-right justices he appointed (put forward by the Federalist Society and Heritage Foundation, who are also behind Project 2025), and he’ll get to appoint two more, bringing the balance from 5-4 to 7-2. That will give him literally unchecked power, which he didn’t have last time.

    Have you read Project 2025? If not, you should. They learned a lot from the limitations they faced in 2016, and have worked this whole time to make sure they will have free reign this time.


  • It isn’t about trump. He’s just the frontman for a larger fascist movement, who now have the House, Congress, Supreme Court, and have infiltrated the legislature at the state level. They will enact Project 2025 and all they need from trump are rubber stamps between rounds of golf.

    The whole reason they chose him was because he’s practically illiterate and insanely easy to manipulate. He doesn’t need to do anything except put his signature on whatever shit they put in front of him. And they have a comprehensive plan to dismantle democracy this time.


  • I’m not saying he wasn’t progressive for his time in the context of those stories, but progressive for his time still meant the utter suppression of women within the culture.

    Women weren’t allowed to have opinions, conduct trade, or own property, because they were property themselves. eta: and Jesus didn’t explicitly say women should have those rights.

    If you believe the bible is the infallible word of god, it shouldn’t be controversial that women are like livestock.

    Now, you can rationalise progressive values by saying if Jesus was alive today, he wouldn’t have gone along with all that, but that’s just not what the bible actually says.


  • Yeah, contradictions are baked in, which is part of why it’s endured this long. But for the misogyny and sexism specifically, there aren’t really any contradictions.

    Jesus never said woman are equal or slavery is wrong. You could maybe argue he didn’t condone the genocide of his father by saying lepers deserved compassion or whatever (though that’s also a stretch), but there’s plenty of misogyny and racism in the new testament as well, so he absolutely did not counter any of that.

    Anyone trying to argue Jesus (an apocalyptic preacher who was a product of his time) wasn’t misogynistic doesn’t actually know scripture or history. The preacher in the article is absolutely following the gospel, even if that’s an uncomfortable truth.


  • They do cherry-pick, that’s true. But my point is you don’t have to cherry-pick to wind up at awful levels of misogyny and racism. If you take it at face value, misogyny and racism is the message you should take from it.

    They can hand-wave some of it away with the whole ‘Jesus fulfilled the covenant’ nonsense (which is 109% cherry-picking), but throughout the whole thing, both old and new testaments, women are property and some races are meant to be slaves.

    This is what fundamentalists – who famously don’t cherry-pick, but believe the literal word – believe. It’s atrocious, but their interpretation is literally correct.


  • Well, yeah. The bible was written in a place and time where women were property, like livestock, and if you actually believe those teachings (without doing mental gymnastics), that’s what you should believe.

    The 10th commandment makes this pretty clear:

    You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, nor his male servant, nor his female servant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbor’s.

    Women are included in the list of property you shall not covet, on the same level with your neighbour’s servants and livestock.

    Modern christians try to whitewash the religion, but if you take it as it was written, women are akin to livestock.







  • I’m a user experience designer. My favourite story is from aviation engineering. I don’t remember the year or all the details, but the US Navy had put stupid amounts of money and time into engineering a new fighter jet. It was worked out on paper and built to exact specifications. Then, during the first human test of it, the pilot ejected on the tarmac before it took off. The plane crashed, obviously, but the pilot couldn’t explain what happened (apparently he had a concussion from his unscheduled landing).

    The plane was built again, and shortly after takeoff, the pilot again ejected without explanation.

    What the fuck was going on?

    In the retelling I heard, someone finally noticed the design of the cockpit was to blame. In trying to cram all the standard controls plus new ones into the smallest amount of space, the designers had moved the eject lever right next to the lever to adjust the seat position – they’d coloured the eject lever red, but the pilot couldn’t see that since it was below and slightly to the right of his ass, and both levers were the same size and shape. Nobody noticed this was a problem until at least two pilots accidentally ejected on takeoff.

    This might be apocryphal, I don’t know, but I learnt it as an example of how things might look good on paper, but you can’t really know until a user fucks everything up.