hydroptic

His fanboys are mostly reich-wingers nowadays, and they're completely impervious to reality-based arguments

And the reason why they have to resort to clickbait titles is to get people on their site for ad views

My point is the title in journalism went from a summary of the story to a confusing false statement that might give you a hint of what the story is about.

This is what we get when nobody wants to pay for news anymore. The fact that news media had to turn to ad-funded models is the fault of everybody who refuses to pay for their news

God as described in the Bible suddenly makes perfect sense being a fickle piece of shit because he’s just a bastardized history of seemingly good rulers dealing with completely different problems in completely different ways.

This isn't even all that far from the popular hypotheses about the history behind some of the stuff in the Bible, but the reason why the God of the Bible seems so damn fickle is that it's likely an amalgamation of two different early Israelite / Canaanite gods: El and YHWH aka. Yahweh (and that name probably sounds familiar. Guess why!) If you're interested in history, check out the book A History of God by Karen Armstrong, a nun-turned-atheist-historian. It's an extremely interesting look into the prevailing hypotheses about the history of the 3 Abrahamic religions.

Now, it's been a while since I read that book or about this in general so I'm not 100% sure I'm not mixing Yahweh and El up, but I think in general the ones where God goes all "FUCK YOU IN PARTICULAR" to some person or nation are El. In general in the "Elohist" passages that descend from stories of El, God is described as something really abstract or non-human, such as the burning bush. Also, interestingly the name still pops up in the (Hebrew-language) Bible in various forms.

In the "Yahwist" passages, God is described in a more personal and intimate way, and again if I remember right Yahwew is the more laid-back "facet" of the Biblical God. Interestingly the OG YHWH really hated farming and farmers, and there's a general theme that farming and soil are somehow connected to evil, and you can see some that in the Bible; Cain was a farmer, for example. My own pet hypothesis for this is that that dates back to the agricultural revolution, when conservatively minded people would absolutely have thought that that newfangled woke farming bullshit is going to destroy society, and this sense of farming as a source of evil could have gotten incorporated into religion. Yahweh is also why depictions of God are forbidden.

Historical regional rulers did, however, affect eg. which god was favored, or what was part of the official religion, and on top of that a lot of the stories of different rulers and even some of the prophets in the Bible are essentially self-insert fanfic for some king or another.

Maybe they didn't contribute enough to the collection last time

Getting XCom flashbacks

XCom allows you to flashbang toddlers‽

It's like the "anti drug education" a lot of us had to sit through as a kid. WHERE THE FUCK ARE THE FREE DRUGS I WAS PROMISED DEALERS WERE HANDING OUT????

Shit, I had no idea. That sounds like a fairly anxiety-inducing way to live.

Around the Cretaceous period when I was in elementary school, I had a classmate who was in the JW and their life did sort of seem pretty drab compared to the rest of us, at least based on what they talked about, but I guess it's no surprise that they didn't much venture into the whole Armageddon thing for example, being 7–9yo at the time.

Ah nice, thanks. Might not be a good game for my poor Steam Deck then, it's a terrific system but a CPU & GPU powerhouse it ain't.

I have a weird "mixed" connection to the eastern block. I'm Finnish but in my 40's, so my childhood's Finland was in some ways a hybrid between a "fully capitalist" market economy and some more socialist features (and not just social democracy) thanks to us having to walk a bit of a tightrope with the Soviets so we could stay independent.

But eg. a surprising amount of the "Socialist cube" concrete houses you see especially in the former East Germany, but also in some other parts of the Eastern Bloc, were actully made from Finnish concrete elements. We also built a zillion of them with the same ideology behind it: functional / brutalist rather than anything fancy, which means they were affordable for everyone and cheap to build. I've lived a huge chunk of my life in some Socialist cube or another

Wait, wait, wait: is this seriously what JWs believe? I honestly don't know much about them except that they're somehow weird.

Also fun (???) tidbit, that "But we can take comfort in knowing" phrase.