DomeGuy @ DomeGuy @lemmy.world

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10 mo. ago

That's a hell of a lot of words that aren't either "of course we should vote in every election for the best possible candidate" or "no, we should withhold our votes in the general if the Dems don't nominate someone sufficiently progressive."

If you mean the latter, say it. If you don't, then say that, too.

So, you are in favor of "my guy or the Nazi" voting? I didn't hear a "no", there.

It isn't "loser talk" to recognize the rules that elections run by, or to push back against the "both sides" rhetoric that lets the Overton window drift ever rightward.

Either you show up and vote in every election for the least bad candidate, be they good or great or only "not as bad", or you are doing more harm than good.

What does that fight look like, in your mind? Standing and shouting for Bernie and then sitting out the general when Clinton wins? Or arguing for Bernie in the primary since he's the best choice and then arguing just as hard for Clinton in the general since she's the best choice then?

Primary-only voting doesn't force anyone to do anything but ignore us harder in the primary.

And if that isn't what you mean by your objection to framing all elections as choices for "least bad", then why are you echoing the rhetoric of those who do?

I don't know how you square the circle of asserting that 'both sided are bad' is what got us here and still echoing "less bad" to buttress their thesis

Waiting for the left to be "good" instead of "less bad" is what makes "both sides are bad" such an effective demobilization tactic.

Picture the clearest example in human history, where one side was absolute villains and the other a superman-esque obvious good guy.

Then explain to me how the good guy is not the "least bad" choice.

Because too many of us who had selfish political actions, and for decades kept saying "both sides are bad" while the side nearest facism kept acting in bad faith.

Democratic elections have always in the end been about picking the least-bad option. And, like it or not, elections and their consequences shape the rest of the world.

God said no such thing.

The Roman Catholic Popes and cardinals are the ones who said "no divorce."

When Moses wrote down the law, the rule was was "ok, divorce if you must."

According to the Gospels, Jesus (God) appropriately said "divorce is bad, and leaving your wife for a younger model is just adultery with extra steps."

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=matthew+19&version=NIV

(Matthew 19, the aforementioned gospel.)

https://www.insight.org/resources/article-library/individual/what-did-jesus-say-about-divorce

(A Texas pastor opining on the topic. A bit too anti-sex for my taste, but a fair sample of Texas conservative Christendom.)

"President barely passes budget despite his party holding both chambers of Congress" isn't a major anything.

It is a despicable continuation of the November 2024 disaster, but this isn't anything worse than what anyone with any wisdom at all saw coming seven months ago.

(It is less-bad than it could have been, in the way that food soaked in piss is less-bad than food smeared with feces. Small victories, though...)

1: what the frick are you doing in Excel that needs even 10^{2 columns? Rows go up to 2}20 (~10^6), and the thing starts to run like ass way before that.

2: Excel does have a RXCX format, if you really do need to go out hundreds of columns.)

3: feel free to ignore. Bitching about being forced to use the wrong tool is definitely more stress than anyone needs.

If you think that's bad, look at what "1" means.

(And, honestly, at least windows' "last big calendar change" and excel's "start of the century when we wrote it" are reasonable points. The unix "let's make it recent so we can fit an absurdly small unit as an integer!" Epoch is just... Weird.)

"this job requires specialized training we're not willing to provide" is the same management failure as "the wages offered for this job are not sufficient to attract workers."

Raise the latter, and give the former with a reduced wage for a set number of years.

If you're dealing with relationship advice, the differences from one person to another are substantially greater than those which separate men and women. Even if we ignore transgender and same-gender relationships, or how a huge portion of western society's gender differences are just toxic sexism.

"How can I (M) suggest $FETISH to partner (F)" is essentially the same question if you swap the genders, make them both F, or make them both M. And to the extent that they aren't, many of the answers and clarifying questions will be.

Are you an atheist, a neo-pagan, or just a protesting with an anti-papal bias?

I ignored most of your anti-catholic bullshit because that's what it is -- anti-catholic bullshit. You asked where I got my assertion from, and I answered. If you want to get into more detail, sure, let's do that.

Go ahead and rebut how millions of lives were lost by actively sabotaging condom use

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_and_HIV/AIDS

Condoms are very effective at stopping the spread of HIV, but they do fuckall to keep anyone infected with HIV from developing AIDS and dying. If the catholics are providing 25% of the world healthcare for people with AIDS, that means that there are "millions" of people alive today because of the roman church. And if celebrities like Princess Diana or Magic Johnson get credit for humanizing victims of the AIDS epidemic, so does the catholic church.

I don't want to defend their wrongheaded opposition to prophylactics due to their family planning usage, but how much blame they get for the spread of HIV and how much credit they get for research and healthcare is, like I said. complex as fuck.

Between 500-1000AD the Church systematically destroyed classical libraries and learning centers.

To paraphrase wikipedia, "citation fucking needed." Here's some random links I found, starting with two biased statements.

https://churchandstate.org.uk/2023/01/christian-vandalism-of-the-classical-world/ https://www.christian-thinktank.com/qburnbx.html

The first is a pop-formatted article by a rather obviously biased author, who doesn't seem to have any actual citations for his claims. The second is a more scholarly formatted article from someone with a more pro-christian bias, but numerous citations are included. Here's a less biased take, whose short form is "no":

https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/20453/did-christians-burn-the-great-library-of-alexandria

The Church burned books, destroyed manuscripts, and executed or exiled intellectuals who challenged religious orthodoxy.

I'm going to infer that you're alluding to the story of Galileo Galilei here. In short, Galileo was condemned by the church not because he was an "intellectual who challenged religious orthodoxy", but because he didn't even try and hide his anti-catholic bias. There's a world of difference between telling the king he's wrong and telling the king that he should abdicate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_Galilei

To paraphrase what I said before, if you want to assert as a matter of faith that Christianity in general or the roman church in particular are bad and evil, then there's no way I could convince you otherwise. If your perspective is more religiously agnostic, however, I encourage you to do a bit more research before you repeat the biased accusations of others as if they were objective fact.

I'm basing it on an understand of history and nuance.

The roman catholic church is at least sixteen centuries old. I dare you to name any human organization of which endured for over a millennium and did not partake in something odious to modern sensibilities.

I could probably go point-for-point with a rebuttal to each bad things you noted, but the only one that really merits rebuttal is "dark ages". The term is out-of-vouge in modern scholarship largely because it was essentially an anti-theistic smear from the start; the roman catholic church's obsessive need to keep books and insist that the world was made by a rational intelligence laid the fundamental foundation for the renaissance, and the era between the fall of Rome and the enlightenment was far more advanced than the term you used implies.

Like I said, whether the roman catholic church is a net-good in 2025 is entirely based on how you weight the value of both the good and bad things they do. You're free to assign them an arbitrarily high negative value because you have religious differences with them if you like, but pretending that they've never done anything good and aren't doing anything good today is a position of willful ignorance.

Come to think of it, I doubt you can find a single organization that was even a century old which doesn't have at least one black mark against them.

The catholic church has been a considerable "force for good" for centuries. Whether or not the bad they do outweighs that is a question of how much value you assign to the bad things they do and how much credit you give them for good intentions.

Sure, they're anti-abortion and implicitly sexist, but they're also pro-mercy, anti-war, anti-death-penalty, and possibly the most pro-science of all theistic churches. Bishops in the USA are obnoxious right-wing partisans, but in other countries they're firmly in the local center or on the bleeding edge of the local left. (There's a reason why the first American-born pop wasn't a working priest in the USA.)

Who I am and who did the study should be irrelevant. An idea should stand on its own or not.

Or do you really want to be the sort of person who dismissed Einstein as "Jewish science" or who told the Wright brothers that heavier than air flight is impossible? (Or, worse, the sort of person who pays for a scam "bomb sniffer" after a terrorist attack, or assumes Donald must be smart because he's rich?)

It's perfectly fine to answer a question with "I don't know," especially when your other option is "no, the emperor must have clothes on."

Since you read it, and don't reference them addressing the fact pattern I mentioned, I'm not sure reading it would be worth my time. I'd love to be convinced, however, if you can answer one question.

How did she categorize a movement as "non-violent" or not?

It shouldn't be. Asserting that "no non-violent protests have failed" ignores an obvious null hypothesis.

Tyrannical regimes attack non-violent protests that get large enough, and then call said movements "violent" to justify what the state did to them.

Right now non-voters are essentially checking a quantum waveform of a box, that collapses to endorsement of the eventual winner.

Id much rather they make a choice, even a random one.

There are no such things as unreconcilable contradictions.