That’s the whole theme song. I don’t understand this meme.

I shouldn’t bother responding to this, but I have to point out that this weird assumption that scholars of Christianity are all Christian partisans seems pretty similar to people who say that climatologists are all biased in favor of a global warming hoax.

You don’t think anyone goes into studying a field to challenge the orthodoxy? That’s the fastest way to get famous. Even if the rest of your field hates you, you can make an incredibly lucrative career out of being “the outsider”. I literally linked to a collection of experts who agree with you.

If you don’t believe the experts, I guess it’s fine. But it’s weird when people use expertise on a subject as proof of bias to discredit expertise. It’s just such a silly thing to do.

I didn’t say which side I come down on. I just said that there is lots of information with plenty of high quality citations.

I’m really happy that everyone is a winner.

It’s weird how many people in this thread are vaguely debating the validity of the historical research into this question when one person has posted a link to a well cited article on this very very heavily studied subject.

There’s even a link to a well cited article examining the skepticism of the historicity of Jesus: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christ_myth_theory

I don’t feel compelled to argue an interpretation. The facts are well documented and their interpretations by experts available. What anyone chooses to do with these are of no real concern to me.

I think maybe execs and investors might feel it’s all the same, but if you’re a project manager for cloud infrastructure for enterprise services or you’ve been working for years on releasing a new component of Bing search that you think is a real gamechanger and some muckity-muck at the top says, ‘Oh, don’t worry about that anymore: a property manager that’s owned by a private equity partner of one of our big investors wants the chatbot that schedules apartment viewings in Huntsville to be more flirty, so go massage the prompts to make it convincingly laugh at bad jokes,’ some of those folks are liable to start grumbling that this isn’t the role that they were pitched when they took this job.

Oh, I see. Thank you for the clarification.

I think you could argue this before the passage of the Nation State Law of 2018. But now it’s enshrined in law that the state exists to privilege Jews specifically and selectively. That’s really putting it all in black and white.

Also I get asked about why I didn’t criticize China or Russia or Iran etc, and the reasons are simple:

1. I do
2. my tax dollars didn’t support their misdeeds and
3. I’m Jewish, so I have a huge investment in Israel’s actions. They insist that I be judged by their actions, so now I have to get involved. Also, I actually like Israel. I’d like it to be a liberal, multi ethnic democracy and not just another Middle Eastern martial theocracy with a Jewish twist.

Hold on a sec: self determination is always within the context of recognizing the right of self determination of other groups and the basic human rights of everyone involved.

Also, Israel already has millions of Palestinian citizens. And all of these people deserve a say in what the resulting arrangement looks like.

A two state solution is one possibility, but there is no strict requirement that it is the only or best way to serve the needs of those involved.

This meme is bad.

1. if you look closely, you’ll notice that there’s no real joke. Israel and Nazi Germany should date. That’s a shit tier joke. It’s relying on edginess too hope paper over that there’s no real humor.

2. from a political commentary perspective, it’s awful. We have a colonial state founded by people who have experienced a collective tragedy that they then allowed to justify displacement of an indigenous population, followed by decades of alliance with Western imperialism and a slide to the hard right, with lots of delusion and gas lightning. And we have an aggrieved former great power looking to expand over neighbors while killing of undesirable immigrants. Yeah, two genocides. But they’re materially different in terms of approach, and the groups pictured hate each other. It’s like you know there’s atrocities, and you know Jews are involved, and that’s kind of the end of your insight but you really wanted to make a meme anyway.

Find something interesting to say.

Also, free Gaza, release the hostages, lock up Netanyahu and all the rest, etc etc

I have good news: It exists! http://retrographer.org/

A lot of them are unrecognizable, but here’s an example of a good one: http://retrographer.org/photos/4215

The bad news is that’s a bit limited. It was the senior project of a CMU student in 2010. It only exists for Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. If you wanted to make one for another city, though, I think you could contact the creator, ask for the code, and then recruit people to get a ton of photos from another city’s historical institutions, and then crowdsource geotagging them (which is what the guy did).

http://retrographer.org/learnMore

I encourage anyone with the power to keep fascists out of office to do what they can.

I also think, though, that if there is one thing that might save us, it would be Jill Stein breaking into the mainstream. I think Bernie’s campaign in 2020 created the conditions that moved Biden and organized what become his turnout operation, and he needs a lefty foil or he’s gonna fall flat on his face.

That’s fascinating.

Well, I guess these things are complicated.

A lot of people have pointed out inherent ideological components of this platform, but I would also suggest that the lean is likely in part from network effects.

How did each of us find our way here? Someone likely mentioned the platform on another social site, or linked a meme, or shared other content.

If the site has lots of left leaning content that gets shared by left leaning people in places where such people gather, it’s going to bais the new arrivals in a similar direction. This is true of most social spaces, I think. And it’s good! I want right wingers to hang out in right wing spaces like Twitter, just like I want them to hang out at their own bars and clubs, away from me.

This sucks. I was really holding out hope that they might chart a better path forward than most of the alternatives.

This is absolutely a myth.

Green party candidates can run and win many tickets other than President, but it’s very, very hard to get ballot access, public funding, or voter awareness. In any state that isn’t a swing state, voting Green most likely has more actual consequence than voting for one of the two major parties. This builds infrastructure that lets Greens organize the way parties do in other countries: doing actual outreach between elections instead of just threatening people every time they need votes.

The Green party is also often the only way to actually challenge the duopoly when both parties are taking the same pro-corporate position. What they do in a race is break a cartel dynamic, which forces Democrats to actually adopt popular positions which they can then be pressured to act on.

Vote strategically: if you’re in PA, MI, or NC, by all means stick with a Democrat, but in about 40 states, you actually have a lot more voice and potential impact voting Green than you do otherwise.

Mojofrododojo isn’t going to see this, because he won an argument so hard he had to block me.

But if anyone else is reading this, I just want to state that being a dick to political allies because they’re upset by a cold hard reality that you reject is not only a shitty way to build successful political movements, it’s just a straight up a shitty way to treat people.

Oh well.

This is out of touch with the problem.

The long term problem is that we don’t have a political economy that actually represents the public.

But the short term problem is that Trump is currently on track to win, and the people who don’t want that to happen are sticking their heads in the sand.

We need to (1) reengage the Democratic base. Biden’s victory in key swing states – Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Georgia in particular – was built on the backs of grass-roots door knocking campaigns by Bernie supporters. His campaign was absolutely reliant on the support of people who didn’t really like HIM, but really wanted to get Trump out of office. Those people will probably still hold their nose and vote for him, but that turnout operation is shattered, and I don’t see a way he can match his close victory in 2020 without it.

If progressives find a champion in Jill Stein, it’s possible that they start dreaming of something better, and if Biden turns things around, they’ll have the drive to rebuild that critical lefty turnout machine.

(2) Biden needs a metaphorical slap in the face. He won last time because Bernie’s team wrote half his platform in a reconciliation committee. This time, there was no primary, so Biden has reverted to all his instincts, and they are TERRIBLE. He’s trying to win Haley voters as if that’s not like Charlie Brown trying to kick Lucy’s football. If Stein gets momentum, maybe it’ll knock sense into him.

This is all aside from the fact that voting Green builds party infrastructure and ballot access for a meaningful third party. There are lots of complicated reasons why voting Green has long-term strategic benefits, but I’m not even getting into those. I’m just talking about how we save Biden from himself. Sorry if it sounds like 4D chess, but polls already show Biden losing and he’s not taking note, so I think seeing popularity for a left alternative is the only thing I can think of that will rescue this thing.

You know, Bertrand Russell might say that in the present moment, you’re the one who needs to demonstrate some facts, but I’ll oblige.

National polls: Losing, consistently.

Key state polls: Biden is losing, in some states by shocking margins.

The midterms: The polls were dead on. A red wave was predicted by pundits who ignored the polls. This was easier to do because a lot of elections were close, and hundreds of close elections make predicting the overall breakdown in seats very hard, but the specific polls were all historically accurate. Polling the presidential outcome in key states is much less unclear. In all the most important states, he’s either losing badly or it’s a toss-up, favoring Trump. I don’t know of any precedent for a polling error massive enough to explain polls like this without Biden being significantly behind. That could change, but it won’t as long as Biden and his enablers keep denying the reality of our dire situation.

The effect of Roe: the polls already capture this. It isn’t like people answer polls without factoring in Roe, and then suddenly remember it at the voting booth. Biden IS already getting the benefit of Roe, and the current terrible poll numbers are how he performs WITH this benefit. He’s historically unpopular. If he were running in 2016 against a conventional candidate, he’d be getting Carter or Bush numbers. These numbers are WITH his advantages.

Here is a question for you: WHY??? Obama had a tough election because he had a brutal economy. HOW is Biden not a runaway favorite to win? Why in a time of low unemployment, following the passage of highly popular bills, against a reviled opponent is Biden even struggling? Even if you don’t think he’s losing (again: it’s really not subjective, he’s objectively losing right now), explain to me why it is even close? What story do we tell ourselves to make sense of the obvious wrongness of all of this? He is doing worse than Hillary in 2016 by a lot. I don’t know how anyone can claim that this is not an absolute catastrophe in the making. Expecting Trump to implode is crazy. He just went through a primary, and he mopped the floor with everyone. Everyone already knows that he’s a monster. What do folks think there is to learn? He’s a historically despised fascist who tried to seize a second term by violence on live TV. If that were going to work, it would have worked by now. That isn’t a strategy that is going to work without Biden either reinventing himself or stepping aside.

This should be a five-alarm fire. Please don’t get mad at me for trying to sound that alarm. Wake UP and figure out what we’re going to do about it (suggestion: demand a new candidate).

Bruh.

Your arguments are totally wasted on me. I’m not saying he hasn’t done good stuff. I’m saying that he’s running a losing campaign, and so far has been totally unwilling to change.

Regarding polling: I don’t know how to get through to you that he’s losing. If you’re not accepting reality, then we’re fucked. Are you going to reject the election results too? It’s not really even in the margin of error most weeks, he isn’t even close to having the votes he needs in the states he needs to win. I can’t believe we’re replaying 2016 when we’ve already been through it. Wake up: we’re on a collision course and need to change direction NOW.

Regarding his achievements: These are largely great. Which just makes it so much more painful that no one knows about them. He’s never been a skilled candidate, and unfortunately getting older has not done him favors. If he had a really strong campaign, he could certainly win, but if you give a guy who isn’t good at the fundamentals of running bad support and bad guidance and a muddled, poorly delivered message, we’re going to wake up under President-for-life Donald Fucking Trump.

Did people forget that he was president? He won. It’s like I’m in groundhog’s day, and no one knows that we already ran this simulation, and the result was terrible.

If Jill Stein hits 15% in polls we’ve wandered into bizzarro world and all bets are off anyway.

We are already in bizzarro world! The leading candidate is a known fascist/rapist/felon, and the current incumbent is the most unpopular president in contemporary history.

People don’t even remember that Trump was found guilty of rape last year, because it’s not even newsworthy because he keeps quoting Hitler. And he is CURRENTLY IN THE LEAD.

Smash the glass and pull the alarms! All bets ARE off! This is a god-damned crisis, and repeating why BIden SHOULD be winning is pure copium. Put down the pipe and put on a pair of comfortable shoes, because saving America is going to need actual organizing work! And that starts with accepting that we have a problem.

I’m not saying that we need to make Jill Stein president, but we need something to convince Biden to either let someone else take the nomination or start running like he means it. He (and you) need the loudest possible wake-up call or mark my words: Trump WILL win.

Which part? I think this is all subjective opinion.