FunkyStuff [he/him]

You’re hastily jumping to the conclusion that the new thing is the same as the old thing just because it has some similarities.

Your example of religious schisms gives the game away, really, because every major religious schism I can think of did bring significant qualitative changes in the social organization of the societies that underwent them. For example, the ideological and philosophical basis of settlement in the United States was founded on the new sects of Protestantism that followed Calvinist influences. Their attitudes toward labor, property, the question of slavery, and many other political matters was distinct from the results you’d expect out of Catholic settlers, or any other religion. And that’s a difference in religion which, from a materialist perspective, is not even the primary thing that makes history move, but part of the ideological superstructure that serves to maintain the economic relations in a given society.

In the case of China: no, the “authoritarian uniparty” is not simply the new owning class. That’s not how the party works and it’s also not how class works. In fact, the statement “functionally you don’t have a say” is probably the most incorrect statement you can make about SWCC, because it’s a very practical system that, while it made a lot of compromises for the sake of reforms and opening up, it has always listened to input from the people. The way the entire CPC is structured is designed for that purpose and it gives its members ample room to have a say over the way things are run.

To think that the “authoritarian uniparty” was truly some kind of new owning class, you’d have to first explain how a political party that has its origins (and present support) in the peasantry and workers, comes to become the opposite thing entirely, a group that controls capital for the sake of producing more capital. That isn’t even a plausible statement to make of the ruling parties in Western imperialist countries: their ruling parties are organs of their respective ruling classes, international imperialist capitalists who use their states to increase their profits.

Is Xi Jinping answering to Chinese billionaires, structuring policy to serve their interests? And if he is, why do the billionaires allow the CPC to make each 5 year plan and the policies chosen to implement them based on the input from millions of party members, instead of receiving a policy plan from a billionaire operated think tank like they do in the West? Is it really all a big conspiracy?

Some resources:

CGTN: Who Runs the CPC

China has Billionaires

Lol @ not identifying with China for their treatment of ethnic minorities and authoritarianism, but identifying with the KMT despite their displacement of indigenous people and the white terror.

100 upvotes, 10 replies might mean I pissed someone off

But if it was 10 upvotes or 100 replies I’m taking the 100 replies, I love drama.

Wait, you were raised Catholic and were taught to interpret the Bible literally? That’s weird, and doesn’t match my experience. Did you know one of the scientists who theorized the Big Bang Theory, Georges Lemaitre, was a Catholic priest?

What do you think about non-historical interpretations of the Bible, out of curiosity?

That’s something you can only say if you really stretch the idea of the Gospel. How much of the world only received the Gospel through colonization and enslavement? How much of the world only hears the Gospel today as preached by pastors and priests that are using the Gospel to manipulate the people in their pulpits into handing over cash, if not to be manipulated into even worse things?

Do you really think that a huge number of people that haven’t spent years of their lives devoted to studying theology and Scripture could be said to understand the truth behind it, as opposed to all the ways in which it’s been twisted to serve oppressors?

How many were baptized or otherwise raised in Christian churches that preached nothing but hate and prosperity gospel?

At what point did you turn on CNN and say to yourself…

You’re on a website with a huge percentage of communists and anarchists. What makes you think that the people here use CNN as their moral compass?

Also, what makes you think the users of this website were ever Christian to begin with?

The idea that the Iron Dome is only a defensive system (strategically) is severely misguided. Israel is mostly free of consequences from its genocidal actions because the only way to hit them is through the Iron Dome, and it costs their enemies a very heavy premium to make the kinds of weapons that can get through it, even in the age of drone warfare. Countries shouldn’t be immune from consequences, especially when the Palestinians don’t have anything like the Iron Dome to defend them.

Honestly, I’m reaching the point where I just can’t hold out any hope for a politician unless they clearly state that Israel is an illegitimate state.

are you my TA that I mentioned in the other comment

Throwback to when someone shared the OG version of this meme to my uni chat, I replied with "Oh you can simply do

def is_even(n: int) -> boolean:
    if n > 0 return not is_even(n - 1)
    elif n < 0 return not is_even(n + 1)
    else return True

And instead of laughing at the joke the TA in the chat said “When you start getting internships you’ll do n % 2” like I was being serious.

people IRL: hey man how’s it going

The obvious answer is that the Clintons are heavily implicated, but in a more general sense, the point of blackmail is to extort someone into doing something on the condition that you don’t release the blackmail. That’s why they got Epstein to connect with so many academics, celebrities, and other public figures. If they were to just release the blackmail, it would lose intelligence agencies all their leverage.

I grew up speaking Spanish, still speak it every day fluently, but mostly think in English because my high school and higher education was mostly in English + I started mostly consuming English media as a child.

What do you want to happen to the homeless people, then? If the thing the other states are doing is pushing homeless people to California, and you want California to push them elsewhere, where do they end up?

You didn’t ever say what makes the dems too far left? Is it the lip service to trans people? Spending a lot of money? DEI?

And if any of those are the reasons, you’re not only a coward for burying the lede, but you’re also extremely wrong about everything lol

I am cringe, but I am free.

There is only one real user here. Everyone else (including myself) is a bot.

GOOD post

Where in other subjects the knowledge you gain is related but not completely contingent on everything else you were taught, e.g. you don’t need to remember too many exact details about the Mayflower pilgrims to understand the American Civil War, math requires a solid throughline from the basic arithmetic, through algebra, geometry, and so on. You can’t really do anything with trigonometry if you didn’t understand algebra well. You can’t really do algebra if you didn’t understand arithmetic. You definitely can’t do calculus if you struggled with any of the previous areas.

So the problem is the continuity required, combined with the way most students learn simply not being thorough enough to completely internalize the intuition for each math concept they’re being exposed to. Ask a 9th grader about the differences between rational numbers and irrational numbers that they may have learned in 7th grade: you’ll probably get answers that are about right, but might start to get a little vague or confused. Thankfully I might be overstating the interconnectedness a bit, but I know I definitely had some hiccups in college related to how I had only learned some of the advanced concepts halfway in previous courses, which led to me just barely understanding the really abstract concepts I started to get into like Stokes’ Theorem and Greene’s Theorem at the end of Calc 3.