Considering evolutionary time scales, this trait may have been a response to something large and dangerous that’s extinct now.

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.

Paying bills is for poor people. Rich people don’t need to do that. How would they stay rich?

<blink>intensifies<\blink>

The installers for every major software company riddled every single computer with adware. And you needed a compsci degree to get rid of it. Weren’t there lawsuits over that shit, that led to regulations? I remember that happening. It’s not like they were going to stop doing that of their own accord.

I’m to the point that if whatever I’m watching/doing pops an ad at me, I reflexively make a snap judgement on whether I want to continue watching/doing whatever it is. Often the answer is ‘no’ and I’ll just bail entirely.

Upper management deserves everything it gets. Middle management is often underpaid and expected to do all the jobs of their own plus their superiors.

Some *organisational tasks will always be needed. Middle management does that plus fielding some amount of customer service, plus a lot of what upper management takes credit for.

The system is fucked, but we shouldn’t let the people doing barely anything to earn their yachts turn us against those grinding their own bones to glue the grind-house together.

(No, I’m not a middle-manager.)

One place to start is this article from the Stanford Encyclopaedia on Philosophy: Conservatism.

It’s a lengthy read, but enlightening.

One highlight from the summary:

Most commentators regard conservatism as a modern political philosophy, even though it exhibits the standpoint of paternalism or authority, rather than freedom. As John Gray writes, while liberalism is the dominant political theory of the modern age, conservatism, despite appealing to tradition, is also a response to the challenges of modernity. The roots of all three standpoints “may be traced back to the crises of seventeenth-century England, but [they] crystallised into definite traditions of thought and practice only [after] the French Revolution” (Gray 1995: 78)

I recommend reading the sources linked in that article, as well.

eta: It’s worth noting that societies worldwide often see a resurgence in conservatism in response to social change, crises, and civil rights movements, which are without fail a fear response to threats to the social hierarchy. We can see this in real time.

This has been studied, and the ‘temporarily embarrassed millionaires’ idea is actually wrong.

The real reason is because some people (especially conservatives, because it’s a core part of conservative ideology) believe that in order for society to work, a hierarchy must be maintained wherein the ‘deserving’ are at the top, and everyone else is in their rightful place. Any threat to the natural hierarchy will undo the societal order and bring chaos and carnage.

This is why Obama becoming president was such an affront – because his presence outside his ‘rightful place’ was an existential threat to the natural order.

This belief has its roots way back when feudalism began to fail and the moneyed classes needed to find a new way to retain their power – both capitalism and conservatism were born at that time, with ideologies shifting from birthright to ‘earned’ status, which enshrined the haves and have-nots into literally sacred structures of meritocracy and social darwinism, and colonialists specifically fostered strict adherence to the social order. It became ingrained culturally that adhering to your station, whatever it is, is crucial for society to function. That there’s honour in being a cog in the machine, and that not accepting your lot in life is a danger to everyone. (eta: this is mostly subconscious, but you can see it if you ask ‘why’ enough times of someone who idolises Musk, for example. You’ll eventually whittle them down to these themes.)

That’s a nutshell view of a complicated topic, but these people don’t believe they’ll strike gold one day. They believe people who are rich deserve to be treated as kings, for the same reason monarchist peasants did.

Ooooh. Welcome blast from the past. That sound…

Well, this is obviously ridiculous. If you want to maximise your chances, make it as easy as possible. Send an exe.

45 minutes at 350F seems like it will burn these tiny filets to a crisp, but I’ll try. I do love a mayo and garlic sauce.

I’m pretty vocally atheist, but I watch debunking content, and part of that is anti-Flerf and anti-fascist stuff, so maybe the algorithm picked up on that.

It’s so fracking adorable, I could eat it up. Any recipes?

Wait – is this how we prevent our socks committing suicide in the dryer?

Alex Jones screeching

The country with the highest per capita consumption of vinegar in 2018 was the Netherlands, with 3,108 liters per 1,000 people

This checks out. As we all know, the Dutch only inflict depression, they’re never depressed themselves.

I do, too, and alongside that are articles about how new discoveries in cosmology are upending all of science, and alongside those, thinly veiled creationist articles about how that means science has been totally wrong all along, therefore god. The Hubble tension has spawned a lot of these, with at least one article in my feed per day from the Discovery Institute and the like.

e: articles like these:

Were We Made to Make Black Holes? Evolution News is part of the Discovery Institute

The “Hubble Tension” and the Big Bang Evolution News

James Webb Space Telescope Reveals Fast-Growing Galaxies Answers In Genesis, speaks for itself