sailingbythelee @ sailingbythelee @lemmy.world

Posts

9

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684

Joined

2 yr. ago

When you think of all the bullshit that consumes the daily lives of politicians and the chattering class, it is interesting to reflect on what Prime Ministers will actually be remembered for.

Mulroney just died and he was primarily remembered for free trade, the GST, Meech Lake, and singing with Reagan. Chretien is remembered for defeating the Quebec separatists, keeping Canada out of Iraq, and the Shawinigan Handshake. Harper is remembered for ending the long gun registry, fucking with the census, and singing Beatles songs.

In Trudeau's case, I think cannabis legalization, the pandemic including the trucker protest, and perhaps his embarrassing penchant for cosplay will be remembered. Of these, cannabis legalization is the most far-reaching. Am I forgetting anything significant?

Fuck Hamas

Does anyone care about the Olympics anymore? Maybe I'm out of the loop, but I don't see people get excited about it the way they did 30-40 years ago when it was a proxy competition between the Free Peoples and The Shadow, I mean, the Soviets.

Agreed, at least for some species like deer. I can't think of too many others, though, especially with global warming. Most of the animals that thrive despite human encroachment, like coyotes, crows, and raccoons aren't animals that we hunt.

Yes, there is that. I am personally against hunting because I figure wild animals are already under enough pressure from habitat destruction and climate change.

Hunting is largely cultural now and isn't needed for sustenance except in very remote places. At the same time, I'm not sure if it is fair to classify a cultural practice as being for mere pleasure. It is a bit more complicated than that. Certainly, in Canada, indigenous peoples and the descendents of early settlers think so.

I'm not sure if I'm misunderstanding your comment, but killing animals for pleasure alone is already largely illegal in Western countries. And that includes hunting. You aren't allowed to just hunt an animal for fun and then leave it unharvested. It is hard to enforce, obviously. But you can definitely be charged for killing deer, moose, ducks, even fish, without a license and at least the intent to eat it. For example, you can't kill a bear, cut off its paws or gall bladder, and then throw the carcass in the bush. You also can be charged for killing or treating an animal inhumanely or in a way that causes it distress. That theoretically applies to all animals, including pets, livestock, aquariums, wildlife, and even small animals like mice and bats.

I might quibble about the Catholic Church being the "original" church since Catholicism only came about after Theodosius I made Christianity the official religion of the Roman state in 380. You could argue that Catholicism started a bit earlier under Constantine I at the First Ccouncil of Nicaea in 325, which is when the Roman state started to consolidate the various early Christian beliefs under an official "catholic" orthodoxy. The word "catholic" literally means "including a wide variety of things". The point being that there was already a wide variety of Christian sects prior to the Council of Nicaea.

The Protestant argument against Catholicism boils down to the belief that the Catholic Church is a corrupted Christianity, not that it is non-Christian. And there is some truth to that. The pre-Nicaean churches were free-wheeling spiritualists with a wide variety of beliefs, but that all changed when the Roman state decided to create an orthodox, singular religion under its control. Protestants argue that this adaptation of religious belief to the needs of maintaining state power is the original corruption of the Catholic Church.

Now, two key facts influenced the early history of Roman Catholicism:

1. The Roman state recognized the descendants of Caesar, the Emperors, as the Pontifex Maximus, or head priest, of the Roman state. They also required that everyone adhere to the cult of the Emperor. This was purely ritualistic and was meant as a bulwark to the power of the state.
2. The vast majority of the Empire's citizens were pagan.

Because of #1, the Roman Emperor became the head of the newly formed Catholic Church, which was a unification of Church and State. This is called Caesaropapism, and is also why the Catholic Church retains a hierarchical structure to this day and its seat is still located in the heart of the Western Roman Empire. The Pope is the spiritual successor of the Western Roman Emperor.

Because of #2, Catholicism is highly ritualistic, like paganism, and early Catholicism adopted the worship of saints, which are basically small gods. Saint worship was the bridge between paganism and Christianity.

During the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century, Luther and others made the point that the union of state power with Christianity was a corruption of "original" pre-Catholic Christianity, which was more spiritually-oriented and valued personal conviction over state orthodoxy. Interestingly, the split between Protestantism and Catholicism in Europe also more or less follows the geographic outline of the Western Roman Empire, with southern Europe largely retaining Catholicism and northern Europe largely adopting Protestantism. This implies a political dimension to the schism, not just a religious one. England is the odd man out here because their response to the schism was to create the Church of England, which is basically Catholicism without the Pope, substituting the English monarch as the head of the Church and toning down the saint worship.

The great irony of any Protestant movement that craves Christo-fascist state power is that they are advocating to become the very evil they swore to destroy back in the 1500s.

Societal collapse wouldn't be a return to a simpler life. There are too many of us and we are far too urbanized. Check out Haiti for an example of what societal collapse looks like.

Oh, I see. You mean the Pedro Pascal moustache. Fair enough. Well, we aren't all blessed with the ability to grow a thick, svelte lip ferret.

Well, not all staches are child predator adjacent. The Charlie Chaplain, the Fu Manchu, the Hulk Hogan, and the Inspector Poirot have other connotations.

And the classic 1970s-80s Tom Selleck is definitely the pornstache. Boom-chicka-wow-wow.

I spent several hours trying to figure out why the fish shell configuration page (which is a dynamically generated local web page) wouldn't work, including uninstalling the snap version of Firefox and using apt to try to install the normal version of Firefox. Because neither version of Firefox could open the page, I spent hours trying to diagnose why the fish shell wasn't working properly. Eventually, I installed a different browser and it worked. I finally figured out that it was because Canonical tricked me into re-installing the snap version of Firefox via apt even though that is clearly not what I wanted. I'm still a bit salty about it.

I just bought a new dishwasher and it came with "smart" features like remote start and notifications, which I don't want. Easy solution: I didn't connect it to my wifi.

On the positive side, the manufacturer (Bosch) wasn't pushy about it at all. The only indication that the machine has smart features was a small instruction card, which I promptly tossed in the recycling.

Time for you to go back to school. Your style of argument is full of hyperbole, ad hominem attacks, slippery slope assumptions, hair splitting, and straw men.

But keep going.

Distraction and derailing. Claiming that I'm lying in order to avoid dealing with your logically fallacious argument.

Don't hurt your legs backpedalling so fast.

Hair splitting. But keep going.

I already pointed out the logical fallacies one of your posts, in which virtually every word was part of a logical fallacy. That must be very embarrassing for you as a grown man. I don't think I need to embarrass you further. But keep going. Tell me again that I'm a Nazi.

No, making logical fallacies makes your argument logically fallacious. But keep going.

And another logical fallacy. Keep going. You're doing great!

Keep going. Your hyperbole and moral panic are entertaining. Those Nazis are everywhere, I tell you. Everywhere!