Every 5 years is ridiculous. The difference between 80 and 85 can be stark. I have to get refresher training every two years to legally fly a small plane and that’s something where it takes some serious work to kill anyone who isn’t me or my passenger.
Ever think that maybe it’s not the deportations that are the problem, but the murders and other human rights abuses?
And the fact that there was a lot of fanfare over Snowden rather undermines your point. People did make a big deal about it. It didn’t go anywhere because at the end of the day, the establishment on both sides is in favor of that stuff. It didn’t get any more action after Obama left office.
I didn't plan to. It demonstrates pretty well as-is how people stop thinking and acting critically when their biases are being confirmed, and the trend on HN demonstrates how widespread this is. Well, either that, or the lack of critical thinking in the first place.
That’s your right, obviously. But it’s too bad, because I have no idea if you think it’s a good demonstration because these things didn’t happen, or they did but they also happened under Obama, or they’re new but don’t matter, or what.
I’m pretty sure that if people had tried to obstruct the law in a similar manner there would have been similar death. And unlike today, there was pretty much no bodycam at the time.
Regarding the fanfare… yeah sure big deal… and yet, here we are, with ubiquitous surveillance whose ground work was laid out during the obama administration.
Multiple independent and credible sources including documents from within the DHS show a deliberate strategy of terrorizing and harming civilians who have done nothing illegal, and numerous serious and sometimes lethal cases of violence against protestors (protest is in fact supposed to be legal) and just random people, as well as spurious immigration arrests to meet unreasonable quotas, cruel and inhumane conditions in the holding facilities they've rushed to build to support all this, and a general lack of due process and proportionality throughout all of this. You are uncritically repeating state propaganda
There are plenty of progressive Christians who remember that Jesus’s most important command was to love your neighbor.
The better question is, why are these fundamentalists so successful at co-opting the word “Christian”? Why does “Christian phone network” mean one that blocks homosexual content rather than one that donates 10% of revenue to feed the poor?
Ideally a Christian cell phone network would do both. It would also provide only healthy foods in the office and encourage fitness (gluttony and sloth are sinful), prohibit working on Sundays, and encourage policies to steward our world. It would control off-hours demands for those who are married and have children, and therefore have family obligations to which they must see, and might hold mixers for its singles to encourage family formation. It would expect humility and servant-leadership from its executives and patience from its managers.
I would prefer to do business with such a network but one does not exist. Apparently, people do not believe there's much market demand for any but the first of these.
This is similar to the church itself, which tends increasingly towards alignment with one faction or another. In turn, it becomes blind to the sins of its own and focused wholly on the sins of its schmittian enemy. The conservative church will tell you of the sins of homosexuality but not obesity nor wrath; the liberal will tell you that insufficient love is sinful while ignoring transsexuality. I find neither particularly Christian.
Perhaps the Benedictines could run an MVNO. I am no catholic but they'd probably do a much better job.
Jesus didn't have a whole lot to say about homosexuality or transsexuality. I really have to question your both-sides narrative here.
Why would a properly Christian cell phone network block homosexual content? Even if we take it as given that Christianity forbids homosexuality, that's a prohibition on behavior, not observation. There's nothing in there which says you're not allowed to read about gay people, any more than you're not allowed to read about Hindus.
He had plenty to say about sleeping with anyone outside of marriage between man and woman, notably in Matthew chapter 19. While direct mention is relegated to Paul, Christ operated by whitelisting, so complaining that something isn't blacklisted is categorically wrong. Transsexuality wasn't a thing in that world but is plainly a rejection of His creation.
It presumably blocks it for the same reason it should block traffic concerning first-person shooter games, or content adjacent to self-harm and violence; the latter two were mentioned in the article as additional targets. It is not good to put certain things in one's brain. I along with others don't believe in reading certain things, watching certain things, and listening to certain music for the same reasons. I view it as best as intellectual junk food and at worst as corrosive; we should seek things that glorify Him and content pertaining to violence, homosexuality, and self-harm plainly don't.
The beginning of Matthew 19 seems to be about divorce, not where you put your wiener in general.
Matthew 19 is interesting to bring up, though. The end is all about how rich people don’t get into heaven. Would you say that this service should block depictions of wealth? It can be very tempting, after all.
In Matthew 19, Christ explicitly affirms the definition of marriage given in Genesis. As I said, this is an affirmative definition, i.e. it says what it is. Implicit is what it isn't, that is, anything else. He is answering by affirming marriage as a thing grounded in creation, in the nature of man and woman cleaving to one another in a lifelong covenant.
I think things like "flexing" influencers who idolize material wealth are pretty toxic and blocking them would be good, yes.
I wasn't particularly aware of President Trump until he went for political power. I barely knew of him. I recall having seen him exactly once, in some documentary on the History Channel. He's mentally categorized to me as "politician" more than "rich guy", which is the wrong type of corruption for this case. I had much more exposure growing up to the "flexer" types as the archetypal idolizer of wealth.
You should engage with what I'm saying, rather than nitpicking, or say nothing.
As a prominent figure who has corrupted tens of millions of Christians, I'd hope he'd be more in mind in this sort of discussion.
This isn't just a random aside. My point is that you're focusing on the wrong things. For what I'd see as proper Christians, homosexuality and influencers just aren't very important. Homosexuality has zero temptation for the vast majority, and influencers are just jesters for the modern age. If the goal is to stop Christians from straying, there are much more important things to look at.
I think fewer Christians than you believe take their cues on right living from that man. Maybe I'm biased as a zoomer but I see the influence of "flexers" and tate and fuentes-style ingrates as vastly more harmful, because they function as perverse role models for young men in particular. You may think they are just jesters; that is not so. I wish that were true but it's like saying that "instagram beauty" doesn't affect young women's self-image. It shouldn't, but it does.
I don't see homosexuality as a particularly important issue, as I'm not a member of a denomination that believes it constitutes a Godly relationship. I am, for example, less concerned with it than I am with widespread gluttony and resultant obesity. However that doesn't mean that it's not of any concern, and Christian ethics don't easily accommodate a utilitarian-style ranking of units-harm-done. It was, however, the topic of this particular company and the article about it.
Because the MIT Technology Review would not, upon hearing about a phone network that donates 10% of revenue to feed the poor, contact T-Mobile and request comment on whether such donations from a bandwidth reseller "violate any of its policies". Everyone agrees that you should be allowed to be charitable if you'd like. So there's no polarization pressure in that direction; Christians who want their phone network to be more charitable simply pressure their existing network.
That's not quite what I meant. I'm not asking why this network exists rather than the other one. My point is that when we read the phrase "Christian phone network," we all immediately know that it's going to be something that blocks homosexual content rather than something that donates to feed the hungry, just from those three words. The rhetorical question is, why is that what the word "Christian" means now?
1. It wouldn't be posted here or anywhere else, it wouldn't even be reported on.
2. It would just be called a charity phone network.
3. Generally you don't need to self-segregate unless the outer world is opposed to certain values you have. When something is a Christian alternative, it's an alternative against some societal trend (porn being common). If it isn't incompatible with society, it doesn't need to segregate, so wouldn't; it would just be a phone network that donates to charity and it would attract all kinds. So an X phone network is automatically about the parts of X that are not commonly shared values among society, not about any arbitrary value X holds.
It's the same answer. Polarization pressure causes us to hear the word "Christian" and think only of the controversial parts of Christianity. Notice how you yourself are focusing on their block of LGBT content, even though the source article makes it clear their primary focus is blocking pornography.
You could define the product according its proponents' values, rather than focusing on where they disagree with yours. Then it'd be less polarizing. But I suspect you'd argue that it's less informative to do that, perhaps even outright misleading.
So actually, every one of the four things they list (Jesus-centric, void of pornography, void of LGBT, void of trans) disagrees with my values. I’m not focusing on where they disagree, I’m just taking a shortcut in my writing.
It's not exactly a new thing. People we would describe in the modern day as "religious extremists" or outright authoritarians have been using he name of Christianity in this way for... Well, since Christianity was invented.
Same for Islam and Judaism, though the last one has the roles reversed.
The problem you're trying to identify here is how the public and historic narrative almost completely ignores any positive aspects of these religions and focuses exclusively on the actions of terrible people using religion as cover and justification for terrible acts.
In large part it's relative to location and culture. In the US, if you ask any random person their opinion of Islam, it will be overwhelmingly negative. Vice versa in Islamic societies about Christianity.
There's also a lot to be said of the last era of colonialism wreaking unthinkable damage and actual literal genocides under the name of Christianity, and the damage that Christian "missionaries" still do in the modern day. In recent history, a lot of very, very bad things have been done very loudly in the name of Christianity. Under that banner, Europeans destabilized and destroyed huge swaths of the world. The consequences of which will still be around for generations yet to come. That kind of thing leaks into public and historic sentiment, no matter what. Turns out that the public doesn't really like genocides.
Before I get replies, yes, other people have used other religions to also do terrible conquest and genocide. European Christian colonialism is just the largest and most recent example relevant to Western common knowledge. You should study foreign religions and form your own opinion, it's quite enlightening.
On the other hand, the narrative of the modern era is completely and totally dominated by sensationalism and all the problems that capitalist media bring. Stories about Christian groups donating money don't sell news subscriptions or ad time. Ragebait does, and many religious groups of all flavors are happy to oblige.
There’s an obvious example of this with twin-engine airplanes. Having two engines obviously makes you a lot safer since you still have power if one fails. But dealing with an engine failure takes some skill, and your probability of experiencing a failure doubles. Airlines train their pilots to handle it, but if you’re a more casual pilot and you’re flying a twin, you have to be careful to ensure it’s actually making you safer.
Another example would be something like a leader/follower distributed data storage system. It (and maybe its clients) needs to maintain a coherent view of which the leader node is. This adds significant complexity, and in many cases is no longer worth it.
Two engines also give you a lot more options for control surface failures. It's objectively safer and why all commercial airliners are (at least) two engine. But it does require more training for the pilot.
As long as you didn't have any gay friends or family, or just cared how other people get treated.
It's not like being straight was perfect protection. You'd get abuse just for acting in ways that had been arbitrarily decided to be gay-coded.
There was plenty of other bigotry to deal with as well. For example, support for interracial marriage was under 50% at the beginning of the decade (in the US), and was still under 2/3rds by the end. Bigotry is still plentiful, of course, but it was quite a bit worse then.
There was the sense that tech and the internet would change human systems. Information wants to be free and all that. The individual power granted by tech would lead to individual liberty. Traditional power structures would crumble when faced with this.
We didn't realize that it only felt that way because the people with power didn't care yet. Tech was like an ant crawling across a picnic blanket and thinking it's powerful because the people aren't doing anything about it. Once traditional power structures woke up to tech and the internet, they coopted it all.
reply