Of all the Christians to put shade on I wouldn’t have thrown Paul in the lot. Paul seemed like a pretty down to earth person from everything I read, he was basically a riches to rags semi militant hobo hippie. Now Peter…

Some of the most Christian acting people I have known were Jews, Muslims, and Atheists.

…Win?

Jokes aside, if you don’t believe in god and end up going to heaven because you were actually a good person that would be a win in my book, but I would imagine the atheist in this event would be eternally upset that they were wrong in their actual premise. Joke is more funny if you ended up in a non-Christian afterlife.

That’s the thing, looking at the company they don’t work “normal labor” jobs. Infosys is into info tech, consulting, and outsourcing services and looking at their acquisition history I get the impression they buy up smaller companies and consolidate their work into their product. Basically they make websites and tools that your company buys for $100k to analyze and optimize workflow, but the site doesn’t work well and they never fix it. After 2 years enough time has passed that the higher ups don’t feel embarrassed retiring the software and buying something else. Also, rather than just coding themselves they code with AI or buy other companies that already wrote the code and put it into their own product.

At the end of the day they aren’t “working,” they are being available. They are the shitty guy who is answering a work call on a Saturday while they are supposed to be watching their kid’s ball game. They are the person who has to step out of the movie theater because they are getting an urgent work call at 10 pm on Friday. They are the person who flies back from their vacation two days early because the boss wants to ask about sales numbers. This is how Executive suite types say they work 16 hour days 7 days a week, they count every hour of the day as work because they are available, not because they were being productive that entire time.

I don’t know, I feel like that’s a bit of a stretch. If god exists, creation is because of them, and early humans and faith are shaped by them, then the concept of a god who purports themselves as objectively good despite subjective proof otherwise doesn’t seem unlikely. The idea that god might not be good in the way we think good should be is relatively modern and prior to the last 100-200 years god was good because everything prior said so. For fucks sake most people couldn’t read and just trusted the guy in robes to tell them what to think.

So yeah, just like me trimming a plant and putting it in rooting hormone 1000 times, I think an all powerful and knowable god could theoretically always inevitably result in Christianity if they wanted, the bar isn’t that high when the majority of the species lifetime is dismally stupid.

Also, your argument is inherently flawed if you think the contrast of a good god must be an evil one. Concepts of good and evil have fluctuated wildly over the centuries, both in location and sentiment. If god made everything and said they are good then at best good to us doesn’t mean the same thing as good means to them and trying to frame the argument in that is meaningless.

At the end of the day you get to decide if you believe in god or not, if you do believe in god you can still decide whether you like “god” and want to follow it; however, making the logical leap that god doesn’t exist because they aren’t good by your definition is fundamentally flawed.

If you’ve never seen it I recommend you watch the movie, “The Man from Earth.” It’s a short “indy-esque” movie and, without too many spoilers, focuses on a man who claims he is a prehistoric man who just never died. In his long life span he says he traveled to India and studied with the Buddah and while returning west began to spread the Buddah’s teachings, in time people began to call him Jesus.

Really interesting movie, lots of great thought experiment stuff, but it does make an interesting point that the literal teachings of Jesus are so different from the old testament teachings that one almost wonders how they could come from the same source.

Also I don’t think it’s even worth examining a flawed deity in the context of Christianity, because it’s clearly something they made up. “Whats that, lord? Go kill the people we don’t like and steal their land and take their virgins as war brides? Well if God says so 🤷”

Well that’s part of the problem, the people in the situation are flawed as well. A biblical reference that comes to mind is First Samuel 15:3 in which god instructs the Israelites to kill all of the Amalekites including men, women, infants, nursing children, ox, sheep, camel, and donkey. In the story Saul actually sins and disobeys god by not killing everything he is instructed to kill as fucked up as that is.

When discussing god with atheists it often comes down to a point similar to this, “God can’t be real because if god existed they wouldn’t allow XYZ.” In reality we have no reason to assume as much.

If there is a god that entity could be flawed and faulty while still being omniscient and omnipotent. We assume that a being with human sentiments and unlimited knowledge would have to be a good being, but that’s not necessarily so. It’s entirely possible that if god exists it views us similarly to how we view ants and simply just doesn’t share the concerns or beliefs we feel are naturally just and fair.

At the end of the day god could be a giant toddler on the playground and while they are unfair and unjust you have the choice of either believing and following (assuming the Christian god) to go to heaven or not believing and following and burning in eternal torment.

This is all just a thought experiment, but the argument that god can’t exist because god isn’t good is inherently a flawed argument (not that you are explicitly making that argument, I’m just extrapolating off of what you posted, ie god might not be a good guy).

Honestly didn’t know that Gelsinger was a bible thumper, after his time at Intel I figured he’d just retire and disappear.

a scholar at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Hahahahaha…wait, was that not a joke?

Let me start by saying I’m 100% against fascism, but… we do have a terminology problem. The left overall has a messaging problem, “Oh Black lives matter, so that means White lives don’t?!?” Words do matter, but it’s because they matter that we have a problem. The left seems to ebb and flow on vibes (“Just because we say Black lives matter doesn’t mean other people’s lives don’t”) while the right seems so much more literal, but the subtext is maybe even more implied. For example, they might say “They [people not like us] are taking our jobs,” but what they really mean is that they are taking the jobs we want (office jobs, trade jobs, etc), but we don’t mind them working the jobs we don’t want (basic construction, farm hands, etc), all the while their vibe is wrong and that’s not really happening.

When you call someone or something fascist they probably won’t believe you because fascism equals Nazis which equals antisemitism in most of the common people’s view. I’ll assume that anyone who has found their way to Lemmy probably understands the difference, but at the same time many of this platform don’t seem able to understand that the common person doesn’t know the difference.

There is a big difference between systemic racism vs open bigotry. A bigot is much harder to turn from racism than a person who grew up in systemic racism. It still might take decades to turn someone who is systemically racist, but a bigot will likely take longer. The same applies to a fascist; like a systemic racist they might not understand that they are racist or what racism even is. Education or experience are the two avenues people escape those avenues, but it’s especially hard if you’re doing it alone and if you feel attacked by the terminology.

Fascist = Nazi = Jew hater

“Well, I don’t hate jews, I’m not a Nazi, so I’m not a fascist” -common Fascist

I’ve had plenty of discussions with Conservatives where I took the discussion to a rich vs poor direction or a a personal rights vs governed rights direction and they suddenly become liberals without acknowledging it.

Honestly it’s the same hurdle that the left has had for decades, just because you’re a leftist doesn’t mean you love Stalin and Mao. Messaging is important, one of the most recent persons to break that mold was Bernie Sanders who made it at least semi acceptable to be a Democratic Socialist.

At the very least, I don’t think OP deserves to be dragged like they were for what is to me a pretty reasonable take. In Lemmy, blocking someone acts like getting blocked on pretty much every platform, which is going to be confusing for many

I can agree that I understand the confusion and I also don’t think the OP deserves to get dragged for their initial post, but I think their opinion is fundamentally flawed and the reason they got dragged is mostly because they went in the comments trying to defend their opinion. The problem is that the term “Social Media” has gotten so hackneyed that multiple different things are all called Social Media and the rules of the most common version are expected in the others.

Growing up Social Media referred to Social Networks which are user-centric platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Myspace (I guess potentially TikTok) where you create an account which is central to your experience on the website. Connections on these platforms are made through creating individual friends lists and following specific users which makes it super easy to block someone in the manner described. Now basically everything is called Social Media, including forums and image boards. On an image board or forum you might have to create an account, but the experience was more defined by going through an index of posts not connected to your account. Places like Digg, Reddit, Tumblr, Pinterest, 4chan, and any random ass forum functioned pretty similarly to how blocking works on Lemmy. In most cases the blocked user can still see any public posts you make; they may not be able to search for your posts within their account or respond to your messages directly, but they typically could still see your posts and respond to other people in a thread (even your own). The only exception to this is if they posted on a forum (or subreddit/instance/board/blog) you moderated or otherwise controlled. In some cases Social Networks and image boards are similar, if you run a blog on Tumblr it functions more like a Social Network but if you only browse other people’s public blogs then it functions like an image board

The whole argument is basically “Why don’t forums work like social networks?”

Looking at the post you reference the person you talked to is a transgender person who moderates both LGBTQ+ and Transfem in Lemmy.blahaj.zone, they provide more than enough evidence of their minority status, but that wasn’t really needed. The question was what group was being harassed and thus this interaction would imply that the LGBTQ community is being harassed on Lemmy.

What I feel like you missed in your previous discussion is that the other person was talking about privacy in the context of being outed in the real world. The harassment being referred to was in the context of your real life identity being revealed or connected to your online conversation.

There’s no such thing. They are mutually exclusive. Take queer folk for example. We need privacy to be able to talk about our experiences without outing ourselves to the world. It’s especially important for queer kids, and folk that are still in the closet. If they don’t have privacy, they can’t be part of the community, because they open themselves to recognition and harassment in offline spaces.

Under this context they are looking for a feature similar to how Facebook (at least previously) allowed you to pick who could see your post as you were posting it. That way you could individually disallow specific people or groups from seeing them.

This doesn’t imply that the issue is that someone is being harassed on Lemmy and thus we need better blocking options. It’s really only an issue for someone who wants to dox themselves and still have private conversations, in which case Lemmy and most online forums can’t accomplish that natively across all instances/subreddits/groups. The only solution is to have a private instance with vetting and heavy moderation. If you don’t dox yourself you can generally avoid the whole issue here.

Based on this I think you’re making a different argument than what the block feature is or ever could be.

I’m sorry, but I feel like you need to support the statement “This comes from discussions I’ve had with minorities about the harassment they face on Lemmy and mastodon” a bit more. Your whole argument for limiting the speech of others is predicated on this statement.

I’m not saying that minorities couldn’t face harassment on Lemmy, but Lemmy is by far the most liberal and minority supportive online forum I have ever experienced. Part of the reason Lemmy is so niche is because it doesn’t have the mainstream attention other platforms have and is heavily moderated.

If you are engaging in an instance where harassment is occurring the moderators generally ban the person quickly. If the moderators of that instance aren’t doing their job people generally leave and the instance dies from lack of content (there just aren’t that many people on Lemmy). If someone follows you from a different instance to another the current instance moderators will likely ban them even if the one you met them on doesn’t. Finally, if they are direct messaging you you can block them, they can continue to message you but you won’t see their messages and neither will anyone else.

What minority group have you talked with that are receiving harassment and what extra protections were needed that aren’t already here?

How anyone can sympathise for him I don’t know

At the end of the day he is a human being, that’s why. I’m not trying to defend the guy, but fundamentally that’s what is supposed to divide the progressives/liberals vs the conservatives. The conservatives don’t care except when it’s their own while the progressives and liberals are supposed to care about all people supposedly.

Well I can, but this is where people will argue what counts as “Europe.” Wikipedia maintains a list specifically titled “List of School Shootings in Europe”.

Using the same metrics as the US number (1999-current) the total number of European school shootings is 88, if not for 2024 the US and Europe would be pretty close between 1999 and 2023 (US 131 vs Europe 84).

For the other statistics the “What is Europe” becomes an even bigger problem and also the way schools are structured in Europe gets fiddly. Europe much more prefers a higher quantity of small schools while the US seems to prefer concentrating more students in less schools. So Europe has ~1.47 million primary education schools and 79k secondary education schools for ~70 million students vs the US with 130k schools for ~50 million students.

So, Europe has 40% more students, ~10x more schools, and ~25% as many school shootings. If we don’t count 2024 then Europe would have 64% as many school shootings as the US. One of the biggest holdups for making the data comparable is adjusting the European number of schools to match US schools or vice versa. If Europe had school distributions similar to the US the EU would have ~182,000 schools (70mil/x=50 mil/130000) and if the US had schools distributed similarly to Europe the US would have ~1.11 million schools (70 mil/1.54 mil=70mil/x).

When the number of schools is adjusted for differences in school structure European students have an annual average chance of a school shooting of 0.00185% (0.00184% not counting 2024) (88 shootings/26 years/182000 adjusted schools) or a 0.03% chance of ever having a school shooting ((1-(1-0.0000185)^12)). The US on the other hand would have an annual average chance of a school shooting 0.01369% (0.00403% not counting 2024) (463 shootings/26 years/130000 actual schools) or about 0.2% chance of ever having a school shooting ((1-(1-0.0001369)^12)).

Before anyone points out that my previous math showed 4% I’ll remind you that that was only using 2024 data, not all 26 years.

So when you actually look and adjust for Europe fundamentally having 10x more schools for 40% more students the incidence of school shootings over the last 26 years haven’t been that different. In the US it is about 7.4x more likely that a school will experience a shooting per year than in Europe, when adjusting the quantity of schools, but the % chance is already so incredibly low it doesn’t really increase the chance that a given student will ever experience a school shooting.

It is worth noting that Europe does have 10x more schools, and so when a school shooting does occur less people are in the school to be exposed to the shooting, but not taking it into account is an apples and oranges comparison.

EDIT: Just to quickly bring it back to my original argument, the difference between Europe and the US isn’t really how often a student will experience a school shooting, but rather the attitudes toward such events. Europe seems to grieve, find justice for those hurt, learn from mistakes, and move on with what works. On the other hand, in the US the parents grieve, someone sues, the school system looks for someone to blame, and the only thing learned is how to avoid a lawsuit.

EDIT 2: Revisited to double check and fix some math and numbers, if I messed something up feel free to let me know.

That’s not the take away you should be getting by any means. Yes, school shootings are more common in the US than the rest of the world, but they are statistically very very rare in the US. The reason why schools in the US react so dramatically for such a rare event is because they are trying to protect themselves from liability and lawsuit, not because they are trying to protect students or help troubled kids.

You don’t seem to have read my post…

A lot of this is overblown really. A few things:

1. The vast majority of school kids in the US will never deal with an active shooter situation.
2. 43% of school shooters in the US are themselves active students
3. Only 20% of school shooting perpetrators had no affiliation to the school, meaning that ~37% of shooters were former students, teachers, or parents.
4. From 1999 - 2023 there were a total of 131 school shootings, but in 2024 alone there were a reported 332 school shootings.
5. These are some terrible numbers, but statistically it’s a rare thing. There are approximately 130,000 K-12 schools in the US and ~75 million students per year. If we assume all schools have the same chance of having a school shooting (they don’t) they would have a 0.2% chance that your school will have a shooting that year or 4% chance that in your k-12 years that you would be at a school shooting.

When people talk about school security in the US they often don’t consider how litigious and risk adverse the US is. You don’t lock doors, build fences, and hire security guards to protect from such a small risk chance, if they actually cared there would be a greater emphasis on mental health. No, they do these things to minimize risk, lower insurance rates, and ward off lawsuits.

The defense writes itself,

“Hey, you can’t sue us for your child’s trauma, we did everything we reasonably could to ensure that a shooter couldn’t get into the school. We built a fence, we locked the doors, we made the kids wear clear plastic book bags, we used a metal detector, we hired a guard, we expelled kids who made threats, and we called the police on people who aren’t allowed to be here. If a kid then sneaks a 3D printed plastic gun on site and traumatizes the students it’s not the school systems fault.”

The US is crazy litigious, especially if a government entity is involved and someone might get a pay day. In my area a high school girl and some similarly aged boys ran away from school while at recess to a forest a mile or two off site. The girl then said she was sexually assaulted by the two boys, called her mom and was picked up and taken to the hospital directly (never came back to the school). The school had reported the girl missing, but only found out about the sexual assault after the mother filed a police report and the police reached out. The school cooperated with the police and reached out to the girl and her mother asking if she was ok or there was anything they could do, but the mother refused to answer their (the schools) phone calls or cooperate with the police. A year later the mother sued the school, the school system, the municipal government, and the police each for several million dollars for allowing her daughter to run away from school and for not protecting her from sexual assault in an offsite location. This lawsuit went on for over a year before the judge dismissed the case.

Are we looking at the same meatball because I don’t see any darker areas? I see some flecks of spice, but that looks like an unseared ball of meat to me. There are some tinges of red, but those are from the sauce poured over it, not from cooking. You can see the remnants of the sauce at the base of the meatball mixing with another completely different sauce. Pretty sure that meatball is just unseared boiled meat.