#I hear all your arguments about wealth redistribution

[communistkenobi]

something i’ve never liked is how, when people talk about dealing with the problems indigenous people face, there’s always this assumption that we shouldn’t “punish” non-indigenous people by involving them in the solution. just because their ancestors did something wrong that doesn’t mean they have blood on their hands and that their ancestors’ intentions aren’t their intentions.

i’m not somebody who thinks we should take responsibility for running society instead of the government, but, the situation just just rubs me the wrong way. like if your ancestors wronged people and the people they wronged have to deal with the consequences of of said wrongs everyday, do you not owe it to society to be part of the solution?

i don’t know what to do about this situation, but i just feel like society teaches non-indigenous people they are not responsible for pursuing justice here and i was wondering what your thoughts on the matter. tysm in advance if you reply 🤍

Even if you accept that current settlers are not in any way responsible for or benefit from past colonial violence (which I don’t, but we will sit with this hypothetical for a moment), then the same reasoning must be extended to indigenous peoples. If my wealth and privilege in a settler colonial state is not morally linked to the history of said state, then the oppression of indigenous peoples are doubly not their own faults - which is all the more reason to resolve current inequalities! But this line of reasoning is not logically extended to indigenous people because in the Canadian imaginary (and other settler colonial contexts, but I’m most familiar with Canada so I will speak on this context) indigenous people are considered to be subjects stuck in history, always “behind” us in time. Of course, indigenous people are treated as indigenous in every conceivable way, but they are treated as if they are in the wrong time period. The only acceptable version of this for settlers is for there to be no more indigenous people - only then will there be no debts to repay.

But obviously this is not the case, and can never be the case. I think concepts of individual punishment or retribution are a flawed way of understanding decolonial efforts. A more productive understanding is what Fanon says - for decolonisation to happen, the last must come first. This can be in the form of wealth and land redistribution, legal autonomy, official apologies, the abolition of various colonial institutions, and so forth. This can include stripping institutions of their wealth which consequently means powerful people will lose status and power (the church, for example, which was one of the primary architects of residential schools), but this is not based on individual punishment. Obviously this isn’t immediately realisable in the current state of affairs, and so supporting current indigenous struggles (such as blocking oil pipelines, the MMIWG project, etc) is of prime importance.

And also like just on a general note, settlers do still directly benefit from settler colonialism. Like whenever you hear about a new pipeline being built on indigenous land, the argument is always about how many jobs it will create (for settlers). Churches profit fucking massively from indigenous genocide and every settler Christian directly benefits from this. The RCMP is an arm of the Canadian state that is constantly used to conduct massive amounts of violence and suppression of indigenous people. etc.

And this is also a deeper disease of white supremacy: this open denial of history allows white people today to believe their accomplishments, their privileges, their wealth, are entirely of their own doing, ignoring the mountain of colonial architecture that affords them these privileges in the first place. This also has the dual effect of individually blaming indigenous people for their own oppression. At the heart of this sentiment is an existential white insecurity - white supremacy promises what it says on the tin, and while many white people buy into it wholeheartedly, deep down there is an anxiety about the true nature of white supremacy, because white supremacy only works if it is constantly, violently reinforced at every turn. White supremacy, contra to the claim of white supremacists, is not naturally occurring, it has to be fought for at every moment, it has to constantly add bodies to the pile to justify itself. So when (especially white) settlers claim they are not responsible for the sins of the past, this is motivated reasoning, because if the past does not exist then their privilege as a white person is a result of some biological process outside of history, emerging naturally and organically. 

So like you, I don’t buy this argument, I think it’s deeply racist, and I don’t think it’s arguing the thing people think it is - of course Joe Average on the street is not individually responsible for his government’s genocide, because settler colonialism is an institutional project, but calls for decolonisation are not calls for white genocide or whatever other nonsense. It is like all serious left wing projects an aim towards the abolition of class, the abolition of the settler as a historical subject that exerts power over the indigenous subject. and while decolonisation is a violent process (and I use violence in an expansive, inclusive sense, not just interpersonal physical violence - many indigenous struggles you see today are violent in some sense or another because they are confronting the state), it is only that way because settler colonialism itself is an eternally violent machine and must be sloughed off violently 

[katarascape]

we already have all the resources we could possibly need. houses sit empty. grocery stores throw out literal tonnes of spoiled food and reject perfectly edible products. we don’t need to redistribute wealth. we don’t need to give people more money.

we just need to stop letting things go to waste in the name of money making. just give people what they need to live, it’s not like we don’t have enough to go around.

I get why people share things like "we could take all the money from billionaires and use it to feed and clothe everyone and have universal healthcare and etc etc etc I did the math," why thats compelling, but it's important to keep in mind that isn't really socialism. We can just do those things, without any money being exchanged at all. Like just make a general plan to meet everyone needs and just, do it. That's what socialism is. That's the world we want.

[drivingsideways]

Seunwoo + Seunghyo sick

Hi anon! Thank you for this ask, and sorry it's taken me a while to write!

This one is, in my head, set in my Where Your Treasure Is 'verse, but you don't need to read that to make sense of this. The premise here is that Seon-woo and Seung-hyo are in a romantic relationship and have been living together for a while, and they also run a company together.

"You better take something for that," says Seon-woo at breakfast.

"For what?" Seung-hyo croaks at The Korean Herald, which has decided, on this fine spring morning to lead with an editorial on wealth redistribution that looks like it's been written by a twenty-year old who gets her news on Instagram. Pulling their advertising for the next six months seems overkill, but surely something should be--

"For the flu you've been having for the last two days," says Seon-woo, wheeling his chair around the table toward the kitchen counter. As he passes Seung-hyo, he reaches out to place an inquiring palm against his forehead. Seung-hyo jerks away.

--ah, he has it, yes, wasn't there an interview scheduled today with the Seoul Business News--

"Hmm," says Seon-woo, "Nothing some paracetamol and rest won't cure. Take it."

He moves away, and the coffee-maker whirs loudly.

"Is there something wrong with it?" he asks, "I'll call the company. Didn't they promise noiseless?"

"They did not."

He turns in his chair to look at his partner.

"I'm the one who ordered it."

"I'm the one who read the manual and set it up. This is the noise it makes every day. You're just extra sensitive today because-"

He turns back to his eggs and toast, and the horrifying state of the world.

The problem with living with a medical professional was that they always thought they knew everything about everything. Alright, maybe that wasn't a problem with medical professionals in general. Seung-hyo is willing to acknowledge that the problem, in this case, might be more localized, viz, the man across the table who's judgmentally sipping his coffee , while a bowl of oats congeals into goop in front of him. Why he doesn't wait to finish his coffee before pouring out the cereal, Seung-hyo has never understood. And he's tried, oh, he's tried, to get him to view this logically, but Seon-woo will insist on eating the cold slop every day.

"Did you get a chance to review the Australian distributorship deal?" he asks, swallowing a bite of toast. The bread feels scratchy going down his throat. Had Madam Ji switched to a different bakery?

"Yes, I've made some notes and sent out an email," Seon-woo replies. "I'm quite sure we can do better. I've asked Kim bujang to look into it."

"Oh," he says, picking up his phone, "I didn't see it…when did you send it out?"

He'd been working late last night, how had he missed—

"After you fell asleep at the desk," Seon-woo says, coolly.

He has a vague memory of Seon-woo waking him up, and shutting his laptop for him last night. This was why he hated medication, which he had taken, he wasn't entirely irrational, despite what Seon-woo liked to imply.

It just interfered.

"Well," he says, taking two large gulps of his own coffee, "I better get going, I have a day."

"I bet," Seon-woo mutters, and then gives him a sweet smile when he gives him a look. "Have a good one, hyung."

His expression says that he thinks the probability of that is negative. Seung-hyo's never met anyone as petty as the love of his life, and that's a fact. Well, maybe Ye Jin-woo, which just went to show you—

"I will, thank you," he says, "Shall we have lunch together?"

Seon-woo nods, and this time the smile is genuine, and alright, he didn't care that the love of his life was a petty fuck, he especially didn't care that his head felt a bit like a block of wood, life was good, and he was going to have a good day.

"Bad cold?" asks the make-up professional at the TV studio, her voice sympathetic. "I'll get you some warm water with salt to gargle with, it'll clear up your throat before you go on air."

"Thank you," he says, "That's very kind, but unnecessary."

She pauses.

"It's really no trouble Gu daepyo-nim."

"No," he says, "Thank you. Again. But no."

At lunch, Seon-woo says, calmly, "I'm sure the ten people watching KBN at 11.22 am this morning would have been convinced by your argument, if they'd been able to hear it. Why did they cut you off so quick?"

"A glitch in the sound system," he says, "The sound engineer was profoundly apologetic. I didn't think it was worth making a fuss about."

"Uh-huh," says Seon-woo. "You mean the fact that he forgot to mute your mike properly, so we could hear you hacking up a lung off screen? I think he should be fired."

"Where's your sense of proportion?" Seung-hyo asks. The hot chicken broth feels good going down his throat, warming his chest.

"Left it in our McMansion this morning," Seon-woo says, and sets his chopsticks down.

"Hyung," he says, "Take the rest of the day off."

"I can't," he replies, "There's too much to do."

"Rescheduling a few meetings is not the end of the world."

"It's discourteous to the people who are giving me their time," Seung-hyo replies, "Besides, I'm fine. The soup was delicious. Thank you for ordering it."

Seon-woo waves a hand, "You can thank Kyung-ah-ssi on your way out."

"I'll buy her flowers," Seung-hyo says, because there's no way he's going to face her without even that much of a defense.

Seon-woo says, evenly, "You'll be sure to pick them up yourself, won't you? I mean, there's absolutely no reason why you shouldn't be in a pollen factory- excuse me- a flower shop today."

"You're not as funny as you think you are," Seung-hyo says, rising from the table. "Dinner at 7?"

"Sure," says Seon-woo, "You'll be making crab soup, I hope?"

"Don't push your luck," Seung-hyo says, with dignity and calm, and runs away.

He comes to groggily, in his bed, with no memory of how he got there. The lights are dimmed, and he's sweaty under the quilt. There's movement beside the bed, and when he opens his eyes, bleary, Seon-woo is placing a food tray on the bedside table.

"What time is it?" he asks.

"Past 9," Seon-woo says, quietly. "Ready for some food?"

He sighs, turning on his side to face him.

Seon-woo's expression is fond, even though there's a trace of exasperation beneath.

"I'm feeling better," he announces.

"Astounding," Seon-woo murmurs, taking the lid off a steaming bowl. "Considering you weren't, at any point, sick."

Petty, petty.

"I bet that's rice porridge," he says craning his neck. "Ugh."

"Special from eomeonim," Seon-woo confirms. "She's put me on a deadline to feed you this tonight. So chop-chop."

He pushes himself up, resting against the pillows, as Seon-woo arranges the tray for him.

It does taste good- like childhood, and home, he acknowledges, as he swallows the first mouthful.

Seon-woo is taking off his prosthetics, heaving a sigh of relief. Despite all the advances they've made in the material technology, wearing it for several hours at a stretch and the kind of life Seon-woo led, did make it a bother. At home, Seon-woo often preferred to get around in the wheelchair like he'd done for most of his life. Sometimes, when Seung-hyo thinks of how much pain Seon-woo has borne, he can barely comprehend it. Compared to that—

But that's a thought he'll keep to himself, he's not a fool.

"You're such an idiot about these things," Seon-woo says, as he maneuvers himself across the bed. He raises a hand to brush away the sweaty hair sticking to Seung-hyo's forehead. "You realize being ill isn't a character flaw, right?"

Seung-hyo puts his spoon down.

"So you're a psych now too?" he cribs, picking up his spoon again.

"Don't need to be," Seon-woo says, yawning, and turning away. "You're not that complicated, hyung."

God, the man was so annoying.

It really was a disaster that Seung-hyo was crazy about him.

"Sleep well," he says aloud, as Seon-woo settles down, "See you in the morning."

[linkersint]

The “Rich Getting Richer” Argument

This piece of writing is taken from Bestselling Author Rob Moore book “MONEY”. This book is all about philosophy of money, myths we have in mind about this concept, and how we can achieve financial stability and then financial freedom by understanding the nitty gritty of money!

We normally hear an argument that “RICH GETTING RICHER”. Mr Moore claim that this argument is a myth. Everyone can become rich if he/she follows its fundamental laws.  Those who have more money are doing and behaving in certain way than those who are struggling with it. In below chapter, you will learn why “rich getting richer” argument is invalid.

****

from the book

You hear many people debating, ‘why do the rich get richer and the poor get poorer?’ Many people get frustrated about this and demand a redress of the balance through higher taxation, setting up unions, and greatly increased philanthropy.

There are simple economic laws that explain why the rich tend to get richer. These economic fundamentals bust many of the myths about the rich and poor divide, certainly in the first world. And guess what? The wealthy know and leverage these, and the poor don’t and are leveraged by them.

Common Sense?

Common sense suggests that something tends to move more easily in the direction it is already going than if it changes direction. You could call this momentum, or compounding or simple common sense. Newton’s first law of physics is this:

 ‘An object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion, with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force’.

Of course you’re likely looking for a deeper argument than the rich get richer than ‘because they are already rich’, and the poor get poorer because ‘they are already poor’, but let’s not dismiss something for its simplicity. If you have not attained the levels you desire yet, keep going. Keep on, keeping on, you will get there.

Balanced Economics:

In any monetary system all expenditure must equal all receipts. This means that all spending equals all money received.

People don’t burn money (unless they are The KLF, the British band who set fire to a million pounds of their own money) and even if they did, that money would be out of the system and all existing money in the system would balance between expenditure and receipt. Even when more money is printed, that new money in the system, like all the existing money, balances where all expenditure equals all receipts.

Therefore, of that finite (but huge) amount of money in circulation at any one time: it distributes exactly from those who ‘spend’ the most (expenditure) to those who sell or receive the most (receipts).

 If there is an inequality of balance, which there always is because products and services are not of equal value and humans value money differently, then money moves more freely and in higher amounts from those who value and focus on expenditure higher than receipt to those who value and focus on receipt higher than expenditure.

In other words, money moves from those who value it least (or value expenditure more than receipt), to those who value it most by saving, investing, compounding, (or value receipt more than expenditure). Money moves from consumers to producers.

No matter how many times you may try to use power, rule, unions, regulations, or governments to more equally distribute money, it will always reset its ‘balance’. So, if you want to redistribute wealth more towards you, don’t ever get dragged into the victim mentality of a higher power or system, begging or expecting them to redistribute it for you. The capitalist system is unlikely to change in your lifetime, so it is a huge waste and opportunity cost of your time and energy to fight against it. Instead, learn about and focus on the management, mastery, and rules of money, service, contribution, enterprise, momentum, compounding and velocity, and make it more important to you to understand and value money and wealth. And more will come your way. The more you learn, the more you earn.

Theoretical redistribution of wealth:

It has often been suggested that there should be a redistribution of wealth, from those who have the most to those who have the least. Before we delve into this, there already is a redistribution format: it is called taxation. In most developed countries, taxation is geared towards being a higher percentage of income the more one earns.

The main problem I see in theoretical wealth redistribution is that it doesn’t stay with or serve those it is distributed to. I’m certainly not against sharing wealth with those who need it more, in fact it is contribution that plays a big part in building wealth. However, you can’t manage more money until you learn how to manage what you already have, and the big abundant lack is in education as much as it is in redistribution.

Imagine if a wealthy person owns a betting shop. A gambler comes in and spends all his money, helping the owner make more money. The state increases taxes and redistributes much of the money back to the gambler. The gambler then goes back to the betting shop and makes more bets. The owner might have to increase his margins to compensate for the increased ‘taxation’. This costs the gambler, who keeps gambling, more money. And so the cycle continues, but doesn’t help or change anything other than perhaps the owner moves to another country if too much is taken from him, and the gambler spends more and has a bigger addiction.

Perhaps if the business owner was allowed to create fair profit, was given assistance, protection and tax breaks and incentives to start up, and there was fair competition so that prices self-regulated, then the system would work. Oh, wait a minute, that’s called capitalism. And for the gambler, education and help on the addiction is likely to be far more effective than feeding the habit. While this might seem an extreme example, most people manage their money like a gambler, wasting it and only just keeping their heads above water. It is education that is needed, in our schools and society, on how to manage and master money, not redistribution and handouts that de-incentivize work and contribution.

Lottery redistribution:

   The National Endowment for Financial Education cites research estimating that 70 per cent of people who suddenly receive a large sum of money lose it within a few years. Forty-four percent of lottery winners had spent all of their winnings within five years of winning the lottery. Nine out of every ten lottery winners believe that their new family wealth will be gone by the third generation. Again, you can’t manage more money until you learn to manage what you already have. Interestingly, only 2 per cent of respondents said that they were less happy with life after winning the lottery, despite the data above suggesting a greater percentage can’t handle it, lose it, or feel it will be lost soon enough. Who says money doesn’t make you (more) happy?

   So in fact, there actually is a seismic wealth redistribution right now: from the poor when they get large sums without knowing how to handle it, back to the rich.

Production vs consumption

       Non-wealth, first-world poverty doesn’t contribute. It doesn’t create service, enterprise or economy, and doesn’t care enough about humanity to give value to others. Poverty in this sense consumes more than it produces, and is more selfish than selfless.

      To be wealthy is to give service, to produce for other people in physical (consumable) or ethereal (information) form. To be poor is to consume: wasting or spending money and time-consuming depreciable. The wealthy produce for the poor to consume, and so redistribute wealth towards themselves from the first-world poor. Vast wealth comes from vast production nationally, globally, and in high volumes, whereas poverty comes from a negative differential between production and consumption. Individuals, geography, or governments could cause this.

     The wealthy create enterprise and economy through jobs, value creation, increased flow and velocity of money, contribution to taxes, hope, belief and inspiration to others, service to vast numbers of people. The poor are independent on these to survive.  Virtually all global wealth is now private: 99 percent according to Thomas Piketty in his book Capital. This means that producers finance all state benefits that poor consumers consume. Because poverty consumers more than it produces, this has to be economically balanced by large-scale production, and because of the 80/20 principle, the 20 per cent will produce for the 80 per cent to consume, roughly speaking. And so this will compound in the direction it is already going – the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. It is hard to change the velocity once it has momentum, which explains why when starting a new vocation it can be hard to make money in the early years, yet those who’ve been doing it for decades seem to have vastly compounded wealth and passive income, more easily.

For redistribution of wealth to work, consumers would have to take responsibility to produce more than they consume. If you give a drug addict money, you know much of that is likely to go. If you give any consumer more money without the responsibility and education to produce with it, it will be consumed in the same manner all previous money was consumed. If a producer receives more money, mostly through cashflow, increased profits or leveraged loans (rarely through gifts and subsidies), they will invest it to produce more. Of course you could call this greed, but you could also call this growth, evolution and supply and demand. Greed and growth are only differentiated by an individual’s perception. As long as there is demand and a need for the human race to grow and evolve, producers will produce more and more and more, and consumers will keep consuming. The titans of wealth across the last 6000 years are the largest, most vast producers.

The question is: which will you choose to be, a producer or a consumer? Will you get sucked into debating the rights and wrongs of the rich and poor divide, or focus on service, solutions, scale, and contribution, and enjoy your fair share of wealth?

[nerdsideofthemedia]

Faunus and the White Fang: The Portrayal of Racism

RWBY has been adored by the progressive community due to the portrayal of 4 strong young women, at least 2 of whom are LGBTQ+. Not to mention the inclusion of other LGBTQ+ minor characters.

Despite this, the show is far from flawless, and it’s time to address what is probably its biggest problem: the portrayal of racism. I suspect this may end up being my most controversial post yet, but, like someone said, “It’s both possible, and even necessary, to simultaneously enjoy media while also being critical of its more problematic or pernicious aspects”.

Before I start I think it’s important to clarify that unlike in conversations about being a woman and LGBTQ+, in this one, I come from a place of no experience, since I am a white European. I do not intend to speak over POC, nor do I claim that my knowledge on the subject is flawless (far from it). Hopefully, this is only the start of a conversation and not the entirety of it.

To be clear: I am not a part of RWBY hatedom. While it’s flawed, I like it, I wouldn’t be doing it if I didn’t. I am criticizing this aspect because racism exists in real life, so how the subject is handled is important and I don’t want the edgelords controlling this entire conversation because their stance on racism in real life is: it doesn’t exist.

Lazy worldbuilding

Like Bright and Crash, RWBY, for the most part, frames individuals as the main culprits of racism instead of the systems which favor certain groups over others. We see this with Cardin, Cordovin, V1 Weiss, Roman and the village people (in the Adam short). Yes, those racist individuals exist, sometimes like caricatures however, they are far from being the only or even the most relevant type of prejudice.

By putting the blame on very specific characters, racism is presented as something easily identifiable and fixable when it’s neither of those things for a significant portion of the population. People often ignore that though laws have changed, biases didn’t magically disappear, segregated neighborhoods didn’t desegregate themselves and the wealth accumulated before wasn’t redistributed. The racist policies of the past created the now and will affect the future unless we try to fix the system.

Keep in mind that the Faunus Rights Revolution happened after the Great War, so… less than 80 years ago. Considering this timeline, it’s just unlikely the Faunus would be equal anywhere, let alone in 2 kingdoms (Vacuo and Vale) and the only thing we see in Mistral is the possibility of discriminating with the ramen shop owner.

The mere fact this sign exists shows discrimination is possible but that shouldn’t be the only thing shown.

Atlas is the exception. In “Tipping Point”, we can hear a conversation about the Faunus, which mentions economic disparity and lack of opportunity, but it quickly fades into the background.

In terms of race issues, Remnant is wildly unexplored, even the renowned for its racism, Mistral. Maybe the writers just thought digging into politic could make for a boring story or maybe they didn’t want to risk alienating the portion of the audience that listens to edgelords. In either case, it makes no sense to have racism as a major theme.

Justifying racism

“Early men were scared to death of the Faunus, and honestly, it’s not too hard to sympathize with that. Seeing something that looks like you and acts like you walk out of the forest and reveal a pair of fangs, can be a little… upsetting.”

Qrow, World of Remnant about Faunus

This does sound a bit like justifying racism and trying to present as understandable. This is an idea that I see a lot. In a review of a book that had a new species and racism as a theme, one of the complaints was that there was no justification given for the treatment like welfare and gangs. Those aren’t causes of racism – they’re just excuses.  If anything, they have a lot more to do with stereotypes and wealth disparity caused by racism.  

RWBY does make this mistake with Blake’s speech in True Colors, which is reminiscent of when people hold all Muslims accountable for an attack done by one, judging them all for that person’s actions, even though we’d never do that for our own race.

“We’re just as capable of hate and violence as the humans, but I don’t think any of us would jump at the chance to point that out. So why are we letting Adam do it for us? By doing nothing and staying silent, we let others speak and act in our place. And if we’re not proud of the choices they make, then we have no one to blame but ourselves.”

Ghira does the same in the Adam character short, claiming Adam’s violence is the reason why people attack them. If you judge an entire race based on the actions of a few – that’s on you.

Um, actually Antifa is the problem

While the White Fang is not the only group of people fighting for Faunus rights (in the first episode, we learn they interrupted a peaceful protest), they are definitely the ones who are given the spotlight and it’s very unfortunate how they’re portrayed. With the exception of Ilia (and arguably Sienna), they are shown to be so radical that they are not only OK with destroying cities, but also mass murder. They are terrorists and don’t even deserve a face.

In contrast, the racists both deal with their shortcomings fast (Weiss and Cordovin), they all are worthy of sympathy and redemption (even Cardin and the ramen shop owner). I think the writers were going for “racists are people too”, which is a troublesome stance to take when you frame the ones fighting racism as flat out evil.

I imagine that Atlas is going to be shown to be more unforgivably racist and the Faunus will be more sympathetic, but… even so, it kind of feels like trying to make a case for “both sides”. Yikes!

Menagerie

I’m not entirely sure Menagerie was meant to be a paradise. It looks like it, Sun expresses loving it, but Blake quickly claims it’s overcrowded. I’ll give it that it seems a lot less developed than the other kingdoms judging by its constructions, but that’s about it. I think that if they were not going for a positive perspective on it, we should have been made more aware of Menagerie’s drawbacks.

To be clear, it’s wrong to force someone to live somewhere they don’t want to live, but I think it’s a bit problematic to present it as a paradise when in the real world, white supremacists are increasing and their way of speaking is by defending a white ethnostate, claiming homogenized societies are better.

Due to the lack of good characterization of the rest of Remnant, it makes it harder to believe Faunus really went to Menagerie due to being too jaded to be somewhere else because of racism.

Adam’s scar

I have written about Adam before and just so we’re clear, I stand by my post – I’m OK with him being there to be Blake’s cruel obsessive ex-boyfriend who wants to harm her and that he basically represents the last obstacle to close Blake and Yang’s arcs of running away and facing abandonment issues, respectively.

This been said, considering the story, the scar was a huge mistake and I have no idea why someone thought it was a good idea. We’re not supposed to feel sorry for him, it doesn’t make us empathize with him – he’s clearly beyond redemption when it’s revealed and it doesn’t tie to his main motivation, his obsession for Blake, which is the cause of him being in the story. The scar would only make sense if he was an anti-villain, someone with a good cause, but evil methods (Black Panther’s Killmonger). That has never been his story though. He’s always put Blake above his cause and ultimately, he meets his end because of his obsession with her, not because she decides to confront him about his methods. Not to mention that if the scar was tied to his motivation, we should have seen it a lot earlier, not 2 minutes before he died.

Giving him a scar that reveals a cruel treatment of Faunus by humans for no other reason than to show racism is going to have a spotlight in the next volume is incredibly cheap and an awful idea, especially when it basically means nothing for Adam himself and doesn’t humanize him at all – he’s literally trying to kill 2 main characters at that point.

“Remnant can’t be racist, because…”

I also want to counter a few bad arguments against the idea there can’t be any systemic racism in Remnant. The examples usually given are Leo being the headmaster of Haven Academy and Neon representing Atlas in the Vytal Festival.

Leo

Thanks to Raven, we learned Ozpin chose the headmasters in other academies, therefore it’s possible to infer Leo was Ozpin’s attempt at fixing Mistral’s racism.

Neon

Yes, she studies in Atlas, but the headmaster is Ironwood, chosen by Ozpin and probably is also fighting against racism as far as the academy goes.

“They wouldn’t allow a Faunus to represent their kingdom”.

The equivalent of “I can’t be racist, I have a black friend”. Allowing a Faunus to go helps with the “we’re not racists, we even have a Faunus representing us”.

Other than Ironwood, I see no one else who could even have a say in that decision.

“She wouldn’t accept to represent a racist kingdom”

This either reveals an incredibly dishonest take or an almost child-like naivety. I am sorry to burst your bubble, but often people do go against their own interests provided the salesmen know how to sell it (there are Muslims who voted for Trump, women who fought against women’s voting rights, etc.). We can have prejudices against groups we’re part of.

Many will gladly go against their groups’ interests, provided they have something to gain (more than a few people spring to mind).

In this case, her decision doesn’t even hurt Faunus as far as we know – it just advances her fame.

“The townspeople weren’t racist since they were wearing masks and had weapons and we never see what’s inside of the truck”

I cannot believe I have to dignify this with a response… First, the inside of the truck is irrelevant. We had no reason to believe it was anything bad and one certainly can’t start shooting someone else just because they find them “suspicious”. Murders have happened because of racist jackasses who wanted to play hero by attacking a black “suspicious” person. Second, it’s Remnant, a place so full of monsters, teenagers are allowed to have weapons. They are clearly needed to go from one town to another. Sure, they could have dropped their weapons, but that still doesn’t change they weren’t attacking, not even in self-defense. Third, Ghira was still in charge of the White Fang and we know that during this time, the methods of the group were mostly peaceful, even if they were already wearing masks.

“They allowed an army of Faunus to go to Mistral”

OK, this is by far the most difficult one to justify, but not because of race – it’s just the authorities should have handled it all by themselves and I highly doubt they would allow civilians to fight against a terrorist attack. As for the racism point, the Faunus clearly warned the authorities, so I think it’s very unlikely they were bad guys and their weapons were awfully rudimentary. It’s not a great explanation, but I don’t think it’s more of a hit on verisimilitude than letting civilians fight.

Conclusion

I think the problems in the portrayal of race is due to a lack of understanding of racism, insufficient worldbuilding which should have been done before beginning to write RWBY and, probably, trying to avoid alienating any groups in the audience, which is not likely when the subject is racism and should not be the goal. This resulted in a mess where it feels like there is a need to frame racism as wrong, yet understandable (WoR), easy to fix, and too worried about holding the audience to task, hence sticking to cartoonish racism. While all of that is already pretty bad, it’s impossible to deny that it isn’t made worse by the rise of white supremacist groups.

I wish the writers will be more careful during the Atlas arc, but I fear we might be entering a white savior’s narrative as Weiss will probably be the focus of it. I tend to give credit to RWBY for putting the minority character at the center of their struggle, but ultimately Blake was there to fight her own and I suspect they will do the same with Weiss – she will fight her father for the rights of the Faunus (at least partially) and she will be the one who ultimately fixes racism…yeah, we might be heading to a white savior narrative.

I am hoping for the best while preparing for the worst. Still, no matter how well the next arc is handled, it cannot fix the past volumes retroactively.

One last note, I think the election of Trump should be more than enough to reveal that racism is alive and well, but if you want to understand systemic racism and the portrayal of racism in media, here are a few links:

7 Ways We Know Systemic Racism Is Real;

Adam Ruins Everything (it’s a video);

NCSC Implicit Bias;

ContraPoints – America: Still Racist (also a video);

Bright: the Apotheosis of Lazy Worldbuilding (video);

Renegade Cut - Green Book - A Symphony of Lies (video).

More RWBY posts:

Filmmaking and Bumbleby

Bumblebee was Always the Plan

Bumblebee was Always the Plan part 2

BB & Renora

Weird Post on Weiss’s Clothes

Foils: Adam and Yang (this one is in wordpress; it was my first one and I didn’t have Tumblr then)

Let’s talk about Adam Taurus (I didn’t post this one on Tumblr because the title and tags could lead Adam fans thinking this was about “his wasted potential” when really it defends the decision of killing him off and explains why it happened)

As usual, the original.

[thessalian]

Thess vs Redistribution of Wealth

My mother and I, as you know, have some significant arguments about economics. She tells me, “Redistribution of wealth doesn’t work!” ... which doesn’t make sense to me. I mean, there’s a lot of ways wealth can be redistributed, and one of them - one that she actually agrees with - is taxation. But she doesn’t want tax rates to rise for any of the wealthy because apparently “They already pay 50% of their incomes at minimum and we’ve closed all their tax loopholes!” Which she says she knows because she sells professional liability insurance to lawyers and therefore would hear about it. I did try to bring up that maybe the tax loopholes and the offshore havens and all that are now only reserved for the super-wealthy and that there’s a lot of stuff going on that anyone who doesn’t make at least eight figures annually will never know anything about, but apparently, in the world according to my mother, everyone has equal opportunities. I guess it never occurs to her from her position of wealth and privilege that there are people who can pay for more privilege than even she will ever see.

Anyway, the issue I have with the “Redistribution of wealth doesn’t work!” thing is twofold: that it does actually work, and that the alternative is worse for everyone in the long run.

Yes, actually, redistribution of wealth does work provided the redistribution is done right. Places with a decent minimum wage ($15+) and even places with universal income have been doing far better than places that persist in screwing over employees for a maximum profit that doesn’t actually go anywhere. What people seem to forget is that employees are also potential customers. If they have money, they spend money. Money circulates. Money does its thing and everyone is better off. If some of these corporate overlords actually redistributed their profits with a greater emphasis on pay, benefits and other things to keep their employees happy - or, hell, even just healthy would do - that still qualifies as redistribution of wealth and yet it benefits everyone.

But let’s say the above wasn’t true and somehow no effort at redistributing wealth worked. Okay, let’s live in that world for a second. But let’s face it: neither does trickle-down economics. If you don’t regulate so that corporate magnates are forced to actually pay a living wage - and I mean a real living wage, not just what they decreed is still a living wage despite not having granted a cost of living increase in decades (even as cost of living has increased exponentially in that same amount of time) - then the money doesn’t ‘trickle down’. It sits there like Smaug’s hoard and the corporate magnates just sit there, on their giant pile of money, and say stupid shit like, “I’ll take all my money and move to Mars!”

There’s this cutoff point, I think, where your income becomes large enough for someone to be susceptible to the scaremongering of terrified old white men who insist that ‘the poor people want to take all your money!’ and I really do not get it. I also don’t get how she doesn’t equate the redistribution of wealth to “make people pay their employees properly” when she sees what I’ve been through before the excess weight that is a rent in London was taken off my shoulders. Then again, she was one of those people who refused government assistance - or indeed any assistance - as much as was humanly possible when she was struggling as a single mother in a low-income (comparatively) job. But she managed a rent on a two-bedroom apartment, maintenance of a car, tuition at night school and raising of a small child without any kind of real issue; yeah, she got my father to buy my clothes (in retrospect, that was a mistake; my dad’s taste in girl’s clothes was execrable) and we went to her parents’ house to do laundry every weekend because we couldn’t afford a washer-dryer and the laundromat was expensive, but she had enough to pay extra taxes to get me into a better school district than we lived in at the time, even if we couldn’t afford to live in that district, so she was doing way better than a lot of the people I know nowadays. I know full damn well she was doing better then than I am now. I guess it’s easy to forget how things were, or maybe it’s just hard to imagine things getting any harder, when you’re safe from it.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

IT USED TO SUCK TO WORK THERE AND IT WILL BE BAD IS THAT MY MODEL OF WORK IS A JOB

Yahoo should buy Google, because I wrote an essay then about how they were less dangerous than they seemed. You can be a great startup founder but hopeless at thinking of names for your company.1 The super-angels were looking for companies that will get bought. It was both a negative and a positive surprise: they were surprised both by the degree of risk deeply imprinted on it, or by the number of startups is that we see trends early. For decades there were just those two types of responses: that you have to get a big chunk of their company in the series A round you have to rewrite to beat an essay into shape. The source of the problem may be a variant of the Bradley Effect. Led by a large and terrifyingly formidable man called Anil Singh, Yahoo's sales guys would fly out to Procter & Gamble and come back with million dollar orders for banner ad impressions. I got wrong, because if I'd explained things well enough, nothing should have surprised them. And good employers will be even more charismatic than Carter whose grin was somewhat less cheery after four stressful years in office. They at least were in Boston. So in effect what's happened is that a hundred years.

Some of your classmates are probably going to be. Which means the ambitious can now do arbitrage on them. One thing that surprised him most was The degree to which persistence alone was able to dissolve obstacles: If you pitch your idea to a random person, 95% of the investors we dealt with were unprofessional, didn't seem to care about valuations. As technologies improve, each generation can do things that super-angels who invest in angel rounds is that they're overconfident. The traditions and financial models of the VC business. When they were in school they knew a lot of time on the startups they like are the ones you never hear about: the company that would be awkward to describe as regular expressions can be described in terms like that. Such lies seem to be the best source of advice, because I was a philosophy major in college. Four years later, startups are ubiquitous in Silicon Valley. Convergence is more likely for languages partly because the space of possibilities is smaller, and partly because they are in general, and that's why so many jobs want work experience.

Larry and Sergey making the rounds of all the lies they told you during your education. Many things people like, especially if they're young and ambitious, they like largely for the feeling of virtue in liking them. Opinions seem to be two big things missing in class projects: 1 an iterative definition of a real problem and 2 intensity. Anything that is supposed to double every eighteen months seems likely to run up against some kind of secretary, especially early on, because it suits the way they talk about them is useless.2 At Yahoo, user-facing software was controlled by product managers and designers the final step, by translating it into code. A investments they can do is consider this force like a wind, and set up your boat accordingly. Morale is key in design. Some kinds of waste really are disgusting. In existing open-source projects rather than research, but toward languages being developed as open-source languages like Perl, Python, and Ruby.

When you design something for an unsophisticated user. The Age of the Essay probably the second or third day, with text that ultimately survived in red and text that later got deleted in gray. But here's a related suggestion that goes with the grain instead of against it: that universities establish a writing major. Investors were excited about the Internet. The earlier you pick startups, the more it has to cost. Few dissertations are read with pleasure, especially by their authors. Really we're more of a small, furry steam catapult. You'd think that would be of the slightest use to those producing it. Immigration seem to work themselves out.

As more of them go ahead and start startups, why not modern texts? So one way to find interesting work is to volunteer as a research assistant. It applies way less than most people realize. The purpose of the committee is presumably to ensure that the company doesn't waste money.3 You can't watch people when everyone is watching you. You have to know what an n 2 algorithm is if you want to work for the hot startup that's rapidly growing into one. Raising an angel round.4 That was why they'd positioned themselves as a media company. Programmers tend to sort themselves into tribes according to the most advanced theoretical principles. Probably not, for two reasons. Good VCs are smart money, but they're still money.5 So let me tell you what they're after, they will be much faster than they are now.

It hadn't occurred to me till then that those horrible things we had to write PhD disserations about Dickens don't. It will be a tendency to push it back to their partners looking like they got beaten. It's only a year old, but already everyone in the Valley is watching them. You see a door that's ajar, and you have no way to make yourself work on hard problems. Co-founders really should be people you already know. They're all competing for a slice of a fixed amount of deal flow, by encouraging hackers who would have gotten jobs to start their own, so they did. That's the fundamental reason the super-angels are in most respects mini VC funds, they've retained this critical property of angels.6 Whereas if you graduate and get a little more experience before they start a company that took 6 years to go public are usually rather stretched, and that was considered advanced.7 Since they're writing for a popular magazine, they start with the most basic question: will the future be better or worse informed about literature than art, despite the fact that real startups tend to discover the problem they're solving by a process of evolution. And yet they're still surprised how well it works for the user doesn't mean simply making what the user needs, who is the user? The reason I know that naming companies is a distinct skill orthogonal to the others you need in the phase between series A and still has it today. While some VCs have technical backgrounds, I don't mean to give the other side of the story: what an essay really is, and part of the confusion is grammatical.

You meet a lot of money—so does IBM, for that matter. The designer is human too.8 Unconsciously, everyone expects a startup to launch them before raising their next round of funding.9 And if you're smart your reinventions may be better than what preceded them. And of course Apple has Microsoft on the run in music too, with TV and phones on the way. Then you've sunk to a whole new level of inefficiency. Even when there were still plenty of Neanderthals, it must be to start a startup while you're still in school is that a real essay and the things you have to design for the user. Like it or not, that this era of monopoly may finally be over.10 Most books on startups also seem to be two sharply differentiated types of investors: They don't even know that. Working on hard problems is not, by itself, enough.11

Notes

If we had, we'd have understood users a lot online.

Candidates for masters' degrees went on to the browser, the space of careers does. Your mileage may vary.

To be fair, curators are in a company if the founders realized. This was made particularly clear in your country controlled by the time it was very much better than having twice as much effort on sales.

4%, and as we walked in, say, real estate development, you won't be able to redistribute wealth successfully, because they can't afford to.

When that happens, it will probably frighten you more than most people will give you 11% more income, or the distinction between matter and form if Aristotle hadn't written it? Corollary: Avoid starting a company grew at 1. For most of the best VCs tend to be self-imposed.

Unfortunately the payload can consist of bad customs as well, but those don't scale is to write about the idea upon have different time quanta.

Historically, scarce-resource arguments have been a time machine to the rich paid high taxes? If you extrapolate another 20 years. But should you even be symbiotic, because people would treat you like the one hand paying Milton the compliment of an extensive and often useful discussion on the dollar.

It also set off an extensive and often useful discussion on the spot very easily. Well, almost. Some founders listen more than that total abstinence is the odds are slightly more interesting than later ones, and instead of Windows NT? Some VCs will try to establish a protocol for web-based applications.

The CRM114 Discriminator. Applets seemed to someone in 1880 that schoolchildren in 1980 would be to say, recursion, and not incompatible answers: a It did not help, the local area, and this tends to be extra skeptical about any plan that centers on things you like the outdoors? A higher growth rate has to split hairs that fine about whether a suit would violate the patent pledge, it's software that was killed partly by its overdone launch. There is archaeological evidence for large companies.

Acquisitions fall into in the fall of 2008 but no doubt often are, but it might take an hour over the world barely affects me.

Wisdom is useful in solving problems too, e. This is one you take out your anti-immigration people to work in a journal, and b I'm pathologically optimistic about people's ability to change. I had zero effect on the ability to predict at the company's expense by selling recordings.

Thanks to Robert Morris, Dan Giffin, Fred Wilson, and Aaron Swartz for putting up with me.

[jasonfields]

THE GREAT RESET waged by the Elites

-jason fields

Soon, if not already, you are going to start hearing about the publicly known agenda now named #TheGreatReset. Re-Sloganed locally as needed. It’s a positive thing it seems at first.

Right now, VERY LARGE global organizations and governments are readying the roll out of far reaching plans to “save” our economy, and our Planet and our People.    These Super Orgs are hoping to get the opportunity to reset ALL things, and finally reign in the chaos.  Country by Country, State by state, City by City. A once and and for all time FIX to “save” the PLANET. Even in the U.S., under the guise of our democracy, for as long as the illusion holds. They have been salivating over the idea of a pandemic for many years, and China is leading the example in controlling populations.

Global Elites, leaders, heads of state, very large foundations and some billionaires around the world have loosely banded themselves together concertedly with the power of nations and a public vision to SAVE US from this current dire economic and covid crisis alike, while resetting all structures in order to control all things , and finally be able to control the "coming climate crisis” for good. And they are fully aligned to profiteer on the chaos. Their vision pamphlet at the World Economic Forum discussed in Davos this year reads “COVID 19 : The Great Reset”   Sounds positive.  And any negative associations will be considered lies of course.

We already know Covid is being weaponized as a tool by various power hungry Entities around the globe. HUGE RETURNS on investment for the ELITE Power Brokers gobbling up entire systems.  AND forever Affecting us.  Swooping up what middle class business owners could not hold together during lockdowns.  For Control of all sorts in the name of cutting emissions, but the acts will be played out by global giants in the spirit of greed and control.  Deals cut all across the globe to lockdown entire nations states to kill economies for reset. 

These global players have a plan to “save” things. It's going to be #TheGreatReset of everything globally. It is packaged as a plan to save the world from coming climate and economic disaster. And to “redistribute wealth”.  Killing the upper and middle class and feeding it to the poor while giving immunity to the Elites. Its mission is public. Not currently hiding.

This alignment would usually be a failure.  Normally it would be IMPOSSIBLE to achieve full government control in the US, pre-covid and post-covid. The ripe window to strike is during CHAOS.   They need to consolidate power in the business sectors in order to dial emissions to planet-saving levels. Even their own literature reads:

“COVID-19, the great reset”. Right now; done by 2030.

This is not a Theory. This is the open and searchable agenda of the World Economic Forum, as well as the International Monetary Fund, and this agenda was greatly discussed at the last world forum in Davos. IMF, by the way, has the financial means to “save nations”.  Many many poor nations are irreversibly indebted to the IMF.  It’s a type of hidden control and colonialism by elites puppet masters.

One of the slogans of the European reset campaign is that by 2030, “We will all own nothing, and we will all be happy.”

One of the key components of the agenda is to replace ownership of ALL things including replacing all businesses owners with government stewards, shareholders stepping aside.

This effort will solve the “imminent climate crisis” by perfectly dialing in global emissions for all businesses with ultimate state control.  By making these fundamental changes, they believe the earth will be saved from the “evils of capitalism” so that we can finally return all businesses to net zero emissions. Not some things... But this time, once and for all things.  From food to production to healthcare and education and you best believe all media and free speech.

With power brokers, the ends justify the means. With Planet Savers it will be the same. An army of young people indoctrinated with the word EQUITY.  And the fearful public will let the government break every process if they they believe their life depends on it.  Versus let's just agree we need to do something about our national crises together.

National production resources will be ruled by Government stewards and people who are supposedly not susceptible to greed and power and such. You wanna talk about fascism? This far-left agenda looks more fascist than anything I’ve ever seen. It’s about control.

This oldish globalist agenda would not usually concern me, because up to this point the USA has been IMMUNE and has still remained free. A beacon of hope, with its own issues. This agenda would be impotent. BUT not anymore post-covid.

Covid was necessary to pull this agenda off. It’s now or never. Regular and sustained chaos is required. Supply chains forever broken and remade. Numerous countries involved will lose some of their remaining freedoms. Many country leaders have been bought to join the Global Elite and Shut the Entire Country Down to cripple the middle class buffer.   

It will require these fascist tactics in order to fully control the regular people who were keeping the food on the table and keep running going efficiently. Don’t be distracted by the covid part. This is not a Covid argument. Nor is this an election argument.

You say: CHECKS and BALANCES will keep our Union together and free of Communist or Fascist rule.  Normally Yes, BUT NO!  The balance WILL be exploited Exactly during the Virus.  Control is never given back historically.  Who needs the house and senate when you have the fearful populist masses, a fixed system, and a common enemy painted by the coordinated state press as evil science denying viral killers trying to steal democracy.

Once FACIST or Oligarchy Control is achieved, historically, and 100% for all time, it is never given back.  Not without blood. And not without paying its global masters.  Free thinking lost forever.

America's small businesses were far too powerful for the elites to control. Our sense of freedom was too strong to give up. Our middle class was too independent. Chaos and hunger must strike first, in order to break our spirit and consolidate power; at least some, as much as they can get.

GREED is Thick and the elites just tasted it. For the last nine months, they tasted a little taste of the glory and GREED.Global elites in 9 short Covid months have added 20% to their billions. And Many doubling and tripling assets. And that is nothing compared to the power consolidated.

Could it happen here?

During the great depression era, the good average German people would have never let the Nazis take complete fascist rule without first experiencing deep economic devastation, confusion and disunity and CHAOS. Watch history. Chaos is required by the movement. They need us dependent, they want to feed us in food lines, and take care of our every need. Again, not a covid argument. They will create the chaos so that they can be the ones to bring it back into order as to their playbook. They will take whatever jurisdiction they can get their hands on. Entire countries and sectors under control.

They believe they would do a better job using OUR bodies as a national resource than we can.

And we will be happy.

Sounds blissful. If there was ANYWHERE ELSE IN THE FREE WORLD LEFT to ESCAPE TO.

I don’t know about you but I am deathly in love with FREEDOM.

And if THEY only succeed in fully controlling half or a third of the free world, they would be delighted. They will make millions of people believe that the Earth's future existence depends on it. And the time is now.

Here is how.   They have already cataloged each one of us individually, to destroy any little part of our lives if we don’t comply, and they will give their low ranking thugs access to the extensive harvested digital database of YOU.

Privacy is personal safety. Do I have something to hide? In the future, Yes a lot of things; like, the whereabouts of my children at all times, my business plans, my location etc.

Great Britain and Europe and Australia are already lining up to “reset” their countries unbeknownst to their people. It is just being slowly rolled out in a controlled message of HOPE . This is not a partial reset. This is the Great Reset.  US is looking at the face of its Manchurian Candidate.

Most Americans only get their news sources from comfortable and synchronized sources that have the deepest pockets of influence and legal team.   They don’t even know who owns that Media outlet, and who bought it for a billion last week. Follow the money.  Check your Media Bias Chart.    Compare notes with your friends who think differently and utilize far different news sources.   Is the media being fair?  What is not being told?  Who is the audience?

Fast forward. It will all seem innocent until we see political parties launch their own partisan police force just like all Fascists and communist movements do to ensure compliance in the streets. By then, the fight for freedom gets much harder, and completely underground.   At this point you actually will need Jesus to help you make it through.  Nothing in the natural will help you then.

This year, countries are soon to roll out with things like the Virus Passport and will use it with various levels of control of your movements and privileges. As the limit of each country's people is tested, other countries and governors will watch and be emboldened with this power grab      orgasm. (Excuse me). Governors who throw house party dinners with scientists and doctors while cancelling our Thanksgiving.  (not a covid opinion) just reality.

The enemy is not within. It’s not our neighbors. It’s not the Democrats, it’s not the Republicans. It's not the upper class. It is the Power Brokers, the global elite conveniently aligned to snatch power in this once-in-a lifetime grand opportunity of Covid. The Elites are also rightly afraid of the peaceful masses, after watching all these other countries be overthrown recently.

I challenge you to take a look at who’s in charge of the global economic forum, and what their beliefs are. Look at their collective capacity to make this GreatFlip. Do this, if only to be informed about what powerful people are doing and what other nations are doing. Hidden mass human rights violations around the globe...uhhh, Fox didn’t tell us that? A Fox would not kill a Wolf either. The Elites are almost powerful enough to destroy what’s left of the free world. Their power is YOU.

But not yet…

Do not be divided or you will give them the very Power they need to pull it off.

Ask yourself, “Why was 2020 so bad?” It's not just any one catastrophe, but hundreds and thousands of disasters. Chaos economics. Other elites may not align exactly to each others causes. Yet, they WILL AND ARE united by greed and are participating because it pays HUGE power dividends to the ruling class, and a large amount of wealth is transferred from the middle class and upper class as smaller businesses get gobbled up and destroyed by the economic blow. Again, not a covid argument. Chaos and public fear is necessary to pull this off.

Much worse, a common core value within the upper ranks of the World Economic Forum leaders is to seek solutions to keep the world's population down. It’s kind of a religion. Do your own research. But it’s important considering it’s the personal hope and mission of Bill Gayytes to save the world by lowering the population, and since he’s so involved in our vaxx-s. Will you be his sacrifice? “Do it for Bill?” This is Not a vaxs argument. I am just going to allow you to jump ahead of me in line. Please go first. I'll wait for round 2, But in many countries, you do not get to choose; you have to just trust that your leaders have your best in mind for your race while they catalog you and suppress your movements.….while any deaths in dark corners of the world will be blamed on covid despite the bullet wounds to increase fear and weed out dissenters. Follow these forceful tactics to their evil sources, the lowdown governor types and their nursing home horrors of fear.

Thank you for listening. Honestly, I predict that these global elites and the media outlets that they own will be greatly embarrassed, and the governors consolidating control, are going to overplay their hand in the USA and fail. God Save us! Maybe they’ll have another shot in 20 years. But we can’t go through this sleeping. Do not let yourself be split from your family and neighbors by Facebook algorithms. Stick with your people and love them anyway; they are not the problem. 

We must not be divided. Do not get caught up in rumors. If you watch the news,turn that Sheeeiiit off for a week and READ broad and various news sources. Challenge your current narrative as if you would have to defend professionally, what are your sources. Know your media biases. Do not limit your findings from only one bias. Hear the spin on both sides. No gaslighting allowed for yourself or your family members. Respect and love your family, aside from their perspectives.

Save your country by doing these little things. Build bridges to people nearby you that you could bless and let them know that you are looking out for them during this time. This will help cure the slow onset of mental illness for thousands of people around the world. if we did this contagious thing. Or maybe you think the govt would be better served mandating government workers to program the love work, the feeding, the monitoring and mental care, and the job placement? Maybe your grandmother won’t die alone if the government helps give company.

More importantly, SAVE AMERICA. Do not let 1-2 term politicians make you so filled with hate that you are willing to compromise and divide. Unless they divide us, they have no power.

Unfortunately, it seems we may have just handed over the KEYS of hate and division with one botched election; and half of America making partisan decisions to not hear the case or see it. 

Just gaslight it. Hear no evil, see no evil. The worst kind of case. Instant result.

Fair elections is all we have. No democracy without it. This is a dangerous problem. 60% of Americans think this will be the last hope of a real election. USA over. We handed them the blind hate they needed. Without hate, we can act with fair judgement and process. But, with mass public hate, the process can be subverted by the people. Hear no Evil. 

The news today covering this is an Act of War on American people. Must remove orange guy, shut down the evidence, perfectly divide the nation… Please do not go there in your heart. Not a perfect candidate nor a bad candidate is worth dividing people by subverting justice. These temporary leaders are not worth dividing over. If we let this happen it will be shortly followed by being herded and corralled by fear to full control. They will use the manufactured violence to justify taking guns, and voices forever silenced.  You then go to work for the dark side, or you starve.

Once the internet is fire-walled, we have reached the point of no return on the stranglehold of power. It's going to be a paranoid beast in its fascist infancy. But, right now, this is a hidden sneaky elite class war being waged and it’s being painted as hate amongst the poor and busy masses, who are freshly being divided by Facebook algorithms. You want to talk about woke?

I pray that the poor masses would not turn on each other to be used like pawns in the next six months.

It is important that you value freedom, and the process, MORE than you love politics. If not, you will have participated in handing our collective Power of the People over to the STATE to never return.

To Liberty,

Jason Fields

[fromthecityofray]

Liberalism: The Religion of the Twenty-First Century - Mohammed Hijab

Here's a link to the lecture Mohammed Hijab, a known Sunni evangelist, gave on 26 April 2019 at VU University in Amsterdam. This is #1 to show that there are Islamic evangelists and scholars we can have reasonable debates with, even if we completely disagree with them, and #2 to show off a bit. There's a long list of my snarcy comments below the video. (I will put them also here in case the administators decide they don't like them).

Liberalism: The Religion of the Twenty-First​ Century - Mohammed Hijab

5:00 - Suffering and happiness, not pain and pleasure. The words matter here. What Mohammed uses brings connotations that we all just want to drug ourselves to death, when instead it's about creating an environment where everyone feels safe and can live their life in peace.

8:00 - We are born equal in that we are human. We have the same rights. Of course in practice we are inequal, but that's the thing - we try to minimize those inequalities as much as practically possible through science and wealth redistribution.

12:00 - Yes. We believe that we as a society, through discussions and elections, can decide what's the best for us - or at least do it better than anyone else. And the same works on the individual level: the individual rights by default are more important than the society. Since we live in a society, our individual rights have to take the second place sometimes, but then it has to very well justified. And we have to be able to discuss those cases and revert them if needed. It seems to me to be a pretty good belief, in contrast with many religious beliefs which are much harsher, and there can't be no discussion about them.

21:00 - Ah, right, incest. Homosexuality is wrong because, err, because what about incest?! Interesting that Mohammed throws this argument (and he does it often) as if it actually proves anything. Incest might not be the best thing ever, but yes - if there's no harm done, and everyone involved gives consent, it shouldn't be illegal. Even if we, other people, don't like it. It's just not our business.

24:30 - If you were born Muslim, do you have to be a Muslim? No. But do you have to stop being a Muslim then? Also no. Do you know why? Because a liberal society is okay with your individual choices.

25:40 - Why two sisters having sex shouldn't be called sex? That's an interesting slip of tongue. And again, that's not an argument. None of these activities should be illegal.

26:45 - Those morals are verified in that they result in more people being happier.

27:00 - Yes. Let's ask about it.

29:00 - Yes, human rights is a fairly recent concept. We progress, we learn new things, and we give names to them. Nothing wrong with that. It's "made up" just us Islam is made up.

33:20 - "State of nature"? Shouldn't it be "the people"? I guess Mohammed here talks about a term used in some older texts, but this is not how we talk about it today. The government has power because we all agreed to live under certain rules, and according to those rules we elected the government.

35:00 - Yes, you do consent by living in the given society while the society allows you to leave if you want. Unlike in Islam which you can't leave.

37:00 - No. There is no sovereign/people dychotomy. The people are the sovereign. We make a contract with each other. There's no monster, no sci-fi creature. Mohammed creates a strawman and then bravely fights with it.

39:50 - As before, sometimes rights of an individual must be compromised, but when it is, there has to be a good reason for it, and we as the society have to be able to change it if we decide so. This is exactly why you can give this lecture and don't have to fear for your safety, Mohammed.

40:50 - Kant is not really that important and we don't have to view his opinions as the law. In fact, we don't. It would really make more sense to talk about the actual modern liberalism instead of strawmaning it like that.

42:10 - In theory, it is possible for such a law to exist. In practice, in liberal democracies such laws are far less common than in countries ruled by religion. We value human life and we seek consent when possible. And no, killing children is a crime.

45:49 - This is an amazing feat of putting the issue on its head. The argument is that because Jews lived in a theocracy therefore apostasy was punishable. Mohammed derives from that that apostasy can be punishable in the modern liberal democracy. To be clear: it can't be. It can't be exactly because we live in a liberal democracy, not a theocracy.

46:50 - Yes, I can and I do. Liberalism is against anti-apostasy law. Mohammed takes things out of context and puts them together in a very shaky construct. Besides, in the same time he wants to convince us that human rights are wrong. Sorry, Mohammed. You can't have a cookie and eat it.

47:25 - aww, a bit antisemity, aren't we...

47:40 - soooo, if we take one bit of liberalism out of liberalism and put into a very unliberal context, and wave our hands a bit, then we can blame the whole liberalism... interesting.

49:40 - "could be", "has been", but it's not. Treason is not punishable by death in modern times in liberal democracies. Besides, and this is more important, a religion is not a monopoly of the state in liberal democracies, so apostasy is not a treason. This is by definition a thing in theocracy, which is by definition not a liberal democracy. The whole Mohammed's argument is based on this misconception. And on the idea that very biiiiig "could be" is the same as "is" in Islam.

50:30 - And it was wrong and we condemn it. People who did it should stand trial. What happened was against the law. And that's the thing.

51:30 - This is sophistry. I still didn't hear any argument supporting anti-apostasy laws, and at this point I'm afraid I won't. Mohammed will just go in circles, cherry-picking definitions until he'll come to some absurd conclusion, that apostasy is the same as killing a child or something.

53:20 - ... and two verses later we learn that if we don't become Muslims, we'll be tortured in hell for eternity.

54:45 - Oh, thank you Sir, that you don't say "kill that ex-Muslim", at least not in western countries. This is so kind of you.

56:45 - Cool. The problem is, in liberal democracies "the contract" tends to be much more "liberal", than in countries where the law is based on sharia. The practice is what is important here, not the theory, because people live in the real world, not in abstractions.

58:00 - Liberalism is better than Islam because it makes more people happier and less people suffering. You don't have to be like us in everything, but if you were more liberal, that would make the world a better place for everyone, including you.

1:00:00 - Hold our beer.

1:00:30 - And we have the Murphy's Law. Liberalism is wrong because Hitler.

1:02:30 - Geert Wilders is not a liberal. He's a far-right scum. Yes, Muslims in liberal countries should have every right to be Muslims. Don't make it into argument against liberalism. Liberalism is on your side in this. If Europe was not liberal, but like Geert Wilders wants it to be, you wouldn't like it at all. Don't make it easier for him.

[timellis]

The Progressive Promise of Basic Income

Recently, legendary anti-poverty activist John Clarke penned an article on basic income that was, to put it mildly, skeptical. When posting it to his OCAP page, he asked basic income proponents to provide their feedback (you can read the comment here). I’ve answered his call, and am reposting my comments below with quotes from the original article (which you can read here) where appropriate.  It is my hope that Mr. Clarke was serious in his request for a dialogue on what I perceive to be a crucial issue going forward, and is open to hearing my concerns about the article he’s posted. *******************************************************************************************

"They realize that a regressive model of basic income can be put in place that provides an inadequate, means tested payment to the poorest people outside of the workforce but that is primarily directed to the lowest paid workers."

You are also describing the existing social safety net that you seek to preserve (and build upon). The idea of a basic income is to replace the income support that is currently provided through stigmatizing and paternalistic welfare models that clawback earnings at rates that effectively trap people in poverty, and to instead deliver it through a vector that avoids both of those problems at a rate that empowers individuals.

"This would be, in effect, a subsidy to employers, paid for out of the tax revenues and it would be financed by cuts to broader public services."

This again would also be true of the social safety net we have now. Indeed, you see this in the States all the time - a huge percentage of Wal-Mart employees receive welfare benefits.

A progressive basic income eliminates the extortion of the existing coercive labour market by providing a real alternative to wages. That is precisely the opposite of what you're alleging. However, if you are really concerned about subsidies to employers, I would focus your efforts on the massive actual subsidies that employers directly get already. You won't run out of targets any time soon.

Your allegation that basic income is problematic for people living with disabilities rests entirely on the assertion you make in the cited article that the proposals currently on the table will be changed at a later date in a way that suits your narrative. You are an excellent organizer but that doesn't come with psychic powers, so I can't deal with those allegations as they rest entirely on speculation. If we are playing "the government will screw this up", then yes, the government could always do a better job, but since that's universally true it's also universally irrelevant.

The last few paragraphs of your article seem to admit everything I just said; you say explicitly that "an income support system that removed economic coercion in a way that progressive basic income advocates suggest, would be more than turning back the neoliberal tide. It would actually mean that the state was providing the working class with an unlimited strike fund. It would undermine the very basis for the capitalist job market. It would constitute social transformation, a revolutionary change that is, to say the least, beyond the capacity of any possible social policy enactment."

You're exactly right, but you go on to say, essentially, that that is "too good to be true". There are too many powerful neoliberals entrenched with vested interests to ever make it possible.

This is almost the exact same argument that left-leaning centrists made in the Democratic primaries last year about single-payer healthcare in the US, which you and I both know is not only not "too good to be true" but is indeed a fact of life for millions that provides real agency to human beings through redistributing wealth to people equitably in the form of essential care and liberates them from the trap of employer-provided healthcare. There's a reason that the health care sector in Canada has lined up so strongly behind basic income; it's the logical extension.

You may find it no surprise that I disagreed with those liberal centrists, and since you're making the same arguments here that they made there, often almost verbatim, I'm afraid I have to disagree with you as well.

I'm cautious about the existing pilot and no, I never fully trust the Liberals. I don't want to come across as discounting your concerns. But I think it is essential that we struggle for income support systems that are based on adequacy, full entitlement and that are purged of intrusive rules and moral policing, if I may borrow a phrase, and that is precisely what a progressive basic income represents.

[anniekoh]

bad-faith ‘biblical’ defense of injustice

More binge reading, this time Fred Clark writing at Patheos on Christianity, justice and reading the Bible. Passages like “Loose the bonds of injustice” are straightforward and yet TV evangelists in the era of Trump preach prosperity gospel that makes wealth (or the appearance of wealth) into a virtue. 

Ignorant jerks abusing ‘the poor will always be with you’ will always be with you

So Moses says “there need be no poor people among you,” but it’s conditional. “If you fully obey …” the Jubilee laws and the other commands he’s just laid out for them, which includes a massive program of land reform, property redistribution, the safety nets of gleaning and gathering, tithes for the poor, and periodic debt cancellation. Do all that like you’re supposed to, and there will be no poor among you.

And then, a few sentences later, Moses acknowledges that this condition seems unlikely to be met. “There will always be poor people in the land” — or, as our translation of a translation of Jesus reciting this in the Gospels says, “the poor will always be with you.” Moses concedes and expects, in other words, that the people will not “fully obey the Lord your God and be careful to follow all these commands.” He expects that they will try to game the system with “wicked thoughts” about how to exploit the poor despite the Jubilee mechanisms set up to prevent that. He expects that they will “show ill will toward the needy,” that they will be “hardhearted” and “tightfisted” and “grudging,” and therefore that, despite there being no need for there to be poor people among you, there will always be poor people among you.

...

But for scripture-abusing jackwagons like Roger Marshall, even Plan B is apparently too much to ask. He cites the first half of Jesus’ quote to argue that “the poor you will always have with you,” so there’s no point trying to do anything about that.

This is the argument we hear 99.9 percent of the time we hear anyone reciting those words from Jesus. It’s an anti-biblical, anti-Christ argument. It’s biblically illiterate, stupid and cruel. It is used, always, to harm and to deny help to others.

The bad-faith ‘biblical’ defense of injustice (part 3)

You can find similar “anti-religious” rants throughout the Bible. “I hate, I despise your festivals,” the prophet Amos reports as the words of God. The Almighty goes on to express divine contempt for church-going and prayer and hymn-singing. Why? Because of injustice. Because workers are exploited and the poor are turned away.

That’s the voice of God expressing God’s willingness to “jettison the Bible if the Bible was construed as legitimating slavery.” That’s God favoring justice in place of religion itself.

It’s no wonder that the slave-owners and slavery interests who ran the Southern auxiliaries of the American Bible Society were terrified of the prospect of allowing enslaved persons to read those words. They knew that would be a disaster for them. “Loose the bonds of injustice, undo the thongs of the yoke, let the oppressed go free and break every yoke” is not the kind of thing they’d want the people they were treating as property to be reading.

...

“Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.”

That’s a favorite verse because it reminds white evangelicals that all we need to do is to pray in Jesus’ name and ask for our sins to be forgiven. It’s often paired up with 1 John 1:9: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”

But that’s not what Isaiah 1:18 says. Read the preceding verses. It’s not about divine forgiveness for our sins, but about “Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean … cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow. …” and then “though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as snow.” (Oh, and that’s not a contradiction of 1 John 1:9 — unless you think that chapters 2-4 of 1 John contradict 1 John 1:9.)

We recite Isaiah 1:18 and we always get it wrong because we ignore Isaiah 1:1-17. We’ve been so thoroughly trained — for more than four centuries now — that everything in that chapter before verse 18 becomes invisible.

The bad-faith ‘biblical’ defense of injustice (part 4)

...the prophets are very clear about the difference here. They don’t leave any room for confusion about the difference between worship and assemblies that delight God as a sweet-smelling form of obedience and worship and assemblies that offend and sicken God as a despicable, wearying burden.

The difference is justice. Justice is the necessary ingredient without which no worship, prayer, assembly, offering or other form of religious expression will be regarded as legitimate by God Almighty. Injustice delegitimizes all religion. It turns that which God has commanded into something that God detests — something that God detests in language harsher and angrier than anything even Frederick Douglass could muster.

A sacrifice, a prayer, an act of worship or obedience may be something God accepts or something God rejects — something God celebrates or something God finds disgusting. And the difference between the former and the latter — according to all the prophets — is justice. Isaiah says this. Amos says this. Hosea says this. Jesus says this. 1 John and James and Romans all say this.They’re not subtle about it. Not at all. They all get pretty loud and angry and rudely tactless when the subject comes up. And yet white American Christianity cannot accept it — can barely even manage to see it.

...

Reading the Bible four times over without ever noticing the major theme of justice is like reading through The Lord of the Rings four times over and somehow not noticing any of the bits about hobbits and elves. But that’s what happened to me.

Please don’t suddenly pretend you care about homeless veterans for just as long as it allows you to oppose helping refugees, because that’s hurting both veterans and refugees and it’s making you miserable

People who genuinely care about one good thing do not treat every other good thing as competition that must be crushed and stopped. They do not argue that justice for X should come at the expense of injustice for Y.

Helping homeless veterans — really helping real people — is good. Stop talking about refugees or anything else as some imaginary competition to that and just jump in with both feet and really do it.

The IndigNation

American society is marked by the otherwise inexplicable phenomenon of the haves resenting the have-nots.

This is such a common feature of American life that we almost get inured to how dazzlingly weird it is. The wealthy deride the poor as “takers” — never quite able to explain why those “takers” don’t seem to have anything to show for it. Where is all this stuff they’ve “taken”? Well, it’s still in the hands of the wealthy. White folks indignantly explain how black folks have always had it so much easier, somehow managing to sound as though they’ve convinced themselves of this enough to actually feel near-constant anger about it. Men resent women. The rich resent the poor. Majorities resent minorities. The powerful resent the powerless.

Americans can sit there, eating strawberries in February, and manage somehow to conjure up an almost genuine-seeming sense of resentment for the (they assume) illegal takers who picked those strawberries and earned less in a day of that stoop-crop labor than the American earns just sitting there for the amount of time it takes them to gobble down their delicious-but-out-of-season treat. They manage to conjure up real-feeling emotions of resentment, anger, grievance, and petulant contempt — all directed at the unfairly uncompensated workers who are, in that very moment, actually making their own lives better and more enjoyable. It’s bonkers.

[clarenecessities]

Tagged by @thelastpilot​ i still cannot believe that you’ve ever spoken to me, hello i love you

Rules:

always post the rules

answer the questions given by the person who tagged you

write 11 questions of your own

tag 11 people

1) If you could have any pet, real or otherwise, what would it be and what would you name it?

oh god right out the gate i’m going Corny as Hell but.. i’d make... my neopet real? no no listen hear me out: i love him

okay that’s my whole argument

2) You now have the superpower to complete one menial task/chore with a snap of your fingers, which chore would you want it to be? (Ex: Dishes, laundry, grocery shopping ((you still have to pay its just deducted instantly)), other)

does homework count as a chore bc if so i choose homework & if not uhhh... scooping the cat litter

3) You can now slide into any job you want, which job are you going to pick?

well assuming everyone else keeps their jobs, i’d be an heiress. go around redistributing wealth like it’s christmas

4) Would you rather deal with extreme heat or snow and sleet?

oh, big time snow and sleet. i moved to washington from california and the novelty of snow has yet to wear off. plus i overheat really easily. sometimes at work i have to just lay on the floor like a starfish & let the tile soothe my fevered heart

5) Whats your favorite aspect of your personality?

uh... hm.... i am...... i’m very protective? 

6) What is your fallback food when eating at a new place?

chicken tenders lmao

7) Are you a “Have a million friends” kind of person, a few close friends kind of person, or a lone wolf?

Few close friends, I’d say? I generally get along with most people but actually Being Friends is still a very scary concept for me so 99% of the time i’m like... someone who’s never held a baby being asked to hold a baby. like dear god why would you entrust me with this, i’m going to break it, why is its mouth leaking, oh god oh god etc. Friendship is achieved only when the baby holder manages to stop hyperventilating and just hold the damn baby

8) You’ve gotta go toe to toe with a mythical creature. You’ll survive (probably) but it’s gonna be close. What creature do you want it to be to look as badass as possible?

hmmm... well i’m already as badass as possible & love most mythical creatures but i’d fight the Jabberwock, so we could get an accurate account of its appearance

9) What is the number on culture you wish you knew more about?

damn, number one?? probably the Rapanui? i spent a lot of time researching the island and its people and the deeper you go, the more you realize is missing. the slave trade and the missionaries destroyed almost all of their culture, moai were stolen and housed in foreign museums that didn’t believe they could walk... we can’t read rongorongo to know if it’s an independently conceived writing system, because we don’t even have the language without the tahitian transplants. if the people of rapanui had more of their culture it might help relieve some of the pressure from the government of chile, and actually get them some help. we have no idea what kind of wisdom was lost, or what really happened there, and while that’s true of a lot of the cultures i’ve studied (the hohokam spring to mind) i think the most influence could be derived from the rapanui

10) Do you prefer to do hard annoying things yourself to avoid spending money, or are you of the mind that you work hard to have money so you dont have to do stuff like that (a good example is paying Movers when changing houses)

oh i am definitely a DIY kinda person. i’m miserly to an unhealthy degree. like it’s technically hoarding but in my defense most of this garbage is only going to be garbage temporarily

11) You can have one make believe weapon (Keyblade, Master Sword, Lightsaber, Excalibur, etc.) what do you wield?

An Claidheamh Soluis! i’m a big sucker for swords but an even bigger sucker for this one specifically.

Okay! I’m tagging:

uhhhh

hm no i’m too scared to tag anyone specific right now but i’ll make some questions and y’all have at it okay bc these are some Gems and i’m v interested to see your responses. tag me in any answers yo 

1. do you have any ocs? if yes, tell me about your oldest oc. if no, tell me about your fav oc of someone else

2. bikes, skates, scootboards, etc.: which is best

3. favorite tree species and why. if you love all trees equally, favorite non-tree plant, but know that i think you’re lying about the tree thing

4. do you have three specific wishes picked out for the whole djinn in a bottle situation, or do you have to come up with them from scratch when people ask?

5. have you seen Trolls? i just watched it and i hated it. please share your thoughts even if you haven’t watched it i’m curious

6. which shrek movie is the best?

7. which non-shrek movie is the best?

8. describe your favorite color without using associated color words

9. do you think you could beat me in a fight? please describe how

10. perfect date OR perfect crime. or both i guess, i mean it’s your date/crime

11. do you believe in luck

[maximuswolf]

What are your thoughts on this other philosophical/theological argument for Christianity? via /r/pagan

What are your thoughts on this other philosophical/theological argument for Christianity?

Here it is:

“My explanations make up for deficiencies you see in Christianity at large as a faith or a religious community; but we all benefit from a deeper mutual understanding. I am certainly richer as a Christian and a human being for my understanding of different Pagan practices and beliefs from my time as a practising Pagan (primarily of the Celtic variety).

It's absolutely true that there is no immediate contemporary evidence for the existence of Jesus but that truly isn't very remarkable. To non-Christian contemporaries Jesus was barely worth paying attention to - he was, in their minds as you say, the leader of a small fringe Jewish cult, and not someone the Romans or the Jews had much need to write about. There are similar problems with confirming the existence of Socrates or Alexander the Great: the truth is it's very difficult to find surviving records from most of these periods because no one was thinking "this will be big history in 2020!". For all three men, we rely on the accounts of people who knew them and/or lived soon after them to know about their lives. If you want to deny Jesus' existence based on a lack of contemporary documentary evidence, you probably need to also deny the existence of Socrates, Alexander the Great and a large number of other ancient figures.

If you were going to make up someone to follow, Jesus isn't terribly logical as a choice. You could invent a Messiah who much better fits the expectations of 1st Century Judaism - you would probably not have called him 'Jesus', for one, because as you note the name is utterly unremarkable. If your goal was power and influence, then you probably wouldn't have had Jesus give the authority to build a Church to Peter, a working class, illiterate fisherman. It's very doubtful you would have John the Baptist in your story at all as someone who is shown, even momentarily, to have some kind of role over Christ. You almost certainly wouldn't have your grand narrative of Jesus' life end in his brutal execution at the hands of the Roman authorities in Israel with the man who becomes the founder of the Church, Peter, depicted as a traitor to the cause who weeps with guilt at what he's done. Instead of having Jesus die and rise again, your story would probably focus on having Jesus win some immense miracle victory over the Romans and then ascend into Heaven triumphant - you would probably cut out the part where he dies and his followers despair. Scholars believe that the earliest books of the New Testament, some of the authentic letters of Paul, date to within two decades or less of Jesus' death; Paul, despite having been anti-Christian for some of his life, does not seem to be aware of any movement to deny Jesus lived. In the 3rd century the Pagan philosopher Porphyry wrote an extensive condemnation of Christianity; Porphyry did not attack the idea that Jesus existed but instead sought to depict Jesus as a false prophet. Bart Ehrman is one of the leading experts on early Christianity in the world: he is also an atheist. There isn't much of a case for suggesting Jesus didn't exist.

With regards to the burial of Jesus and the bribe, theserenitysystem is (totally understandably!) confusing two similar incidents. You're right that the Romans would not have taken the time to bury someone like Jesus. The Bible tells us that this was possible because a Christian sympathiser, possibly a Christian himself, who was in good standing within contemporary society went to Pilate on the night of the execution and asked if he could take Christ's body for burial, and this request was granted (Matthew 27:57 - 60; Mark 15:43 - 46; Luke 23:50 - 53; John 19:38 - 42). This is in fact directly relevant to your observation that crucifixion did not necessarily mean being nailed to a cross and often simply meant being hung or whipped to death on a tree. Ancient Jewish law held that the body of anyone executed on a tree was cursed, and that the land their body was kept on would be cursed until it was buried (Deuteronomy 21:22 - 23). Joseph - the follower who went to request the body - almost certainly persuaded Pilate to hand over the corpse of Jesus on the basis that if he did not do so, the local populace would think it an affront to their God and in keeping with Roman attitudes towards local religion, the best thing to do would be to let Joseph, as a man in good standing, bury the body safely (Joseph, of course, told the followers of Christ what he was doing and took care to give Jesus a decent burial). For Christians that Christ was executed in a way that is profoundly humiliating in ancient culture, and in a manner that the ancient Jews believed meant the deceased was cursed, is an important part of our understanding of what Jesus' sacrifice on the cross means: faced with God incarnate, instead of celebrating Him, we murdered him in the most violent, degrading, brutal way imaginable.

Matthew 25:29 is absolutely an interesting verse! But it's part of a parable; a simple, short story used to illustrate an ethical or moral perspective advocated by Jesus. It was one of the main methods of preaching employed by Christ in His earthly life. In this case, the passage you quote -Matthew 25:29 - is actually a call back to an earlier, identical saying of Jesus in Matthew 13:12. If you read 13:12 first you see that Jesus is using this phrase in reference to believers and non-believers. He explains to the Apostles that he teaches in parables so that those who do not truly listen to him will only hear the superficial story, whilst those who look for the deeper meaning - like the disciples did - will understand that within the story there are important moral and theological lessons. Matthew 25:14 - 29 is a parable that uses the imagery of money as an allegory for how Christians should behave in their faith on the understanding that the Earthly world will pass away; that they should be bold, knowing that change is coming. It follows on directly and explicitly from another parable about the faithful being prepared for the arrival of Christ in His Second Coming (Matthew 25:1 - 13). Just as that parable, which concerns itself with ten virgins, is not a literal story about ten virgins, neither is the parable of the talents concerned with financial affairs.

Matthew 26:8 - 11 has to be appreciated within the context of the particular event that moves Christ to say these things. In this situation, it is the Disciples chastising a well-meaning woman for wasting valuable ointment on Jesus when it could have been sold to benefit the poor. What the Disciples are doing here is not making the argument that these things are wasted economically; there is already the understanding and acceptance that Christ preaches the need to redistribute wealth and support the impoverished. Christ is instead accusing the Disciples of being unnecessarily harsh to the woman and focusing on the worth of her actions rather than considering the sincerity of her faith, and her genuine attempt to do something selfless. He is essentially saying "come on guys: are you really annoyed at the waste, or are you trying to show you're a better disciple than she is?". He is exposing pride disguising itself as charitable concern; concern trolling, essentially. The Lord's seemingly callous words here, about the poor always being with us, are in fact a call back to Deuteronomy 15:11 with its explicit instruction:

Since there will never cease to be some in need on the earth, I therefore command you, "Open your hand to the poor and needy neighbour in your land."

Matthew 10:34 - 37 is not a religious commandment to violence or division. First of all, 'hate' or its equivalent is not a word that appears in the original Greek text; a more literal translation is "whoever sees greater value in his mother or father than in me", not "whoever does not hate his family". The NRSV, the most widely accepted scholarly version of the Bible, renders the passage as "whoever loves father or mother more than me". This passage is a warning to followers of Christ that, at the time of Jesus' life, taking up his faith will make families cast them out and make parents turn against children. Christians are still called to answer this with the peace and love Christ commands in Matthew 22:39; the warning is that this peaceful evangelism will be met with exclusion, marginalisation and violence, as Christ himself demonstrated when his peaceful surrender to the authorities lead to his own brutal, torturous, slow murder at the hands of the Romans. The specific phrasing Jesus uses is a call back to Hebrew scripture once again, specifically to Micah 7:6, which describes a period of turbulence and violent unrest in ancient Judah in which "the son treats the father with contempt [...] your enemies are members of your own household". Christ is warning his followers that, just like in Micah's time, the Gospel will anger people so much they will condemn even their own children for following him. His message here is essentially: "Don't think I've come to cushion the truth just to make things easier. This is how things are, and if you want to follow me, people will marginalise and oppress you for it". The quote from Micah, incidentally, is further significant: Jesus quotes Micah twice, and one of the more notable parts of Micah is its condemnation of the hoarding of wealth (Micah 3:1-4), especially by religious leaders.

Matthew was written as a single volume to summarise its author's understanding of Christ's life and teachings from the source material available. Whilst passages out of context seem contradictory, read together, they make sense.”

Submitted September 14, 2020 at 03:10PM by Competitive_Bid7071 via reddit https://ift.tt/35ArKVf

[anonymoustalks]

idk if lenins polcy of bruning churches was good but you have to have soem kind of athiest government

(6-20-20) You both like politics.

You: hi

Stranger: hi

Stranger: ideology?

You: moderate left

You: you?

Stranger: far left

Stranger: uk

You: ahh kay

You: why do you like omegle?

Stranger: er dunno just fun to chat without consequences i guess

You: mhm that's fair

You: I like to hear about what other ppl think

Stranger: yh and argueing

You: haha I don't really argue that much

Stranger: some people arnt worth ur time

You: mhm maybe

You: where are you from?

Stranger: uk^^

You: I'm from the us

Stranger: noice

You: and I'm totally ignorant of british politics lol

Stranger: i know a little bit about america

You: how does your government work?

Stranger: cos its the centre of the world

You: sorry if this is a really dull question

Stranger: its fine ill asnwer w my limited understanding

You: I just ran into someone who was praising the monarchy

Stranger: pfft

Stranger: haha

Stranger: so basically above everyone we have a queen who approves certain stuff and has the ability to interjec tin products but msotly doesn then you have the unlected house of lords which is aristocrats recommended by other rich ppl and below that the ppl elected

Stranger: we have a prime minister so he doesnt have the same powers as president

Stranger: but hes more powerful than other pm's

You: mhm

You: the house of lords...

Stranger: yep

You: is the aristocracy still a big thing in the uk?

Stranger: its just like the senate in the usa except not elected and idk probaably

You: how does someone get recommended to the house of lords?

Stranger: be rich adn good at something or know someone whos rich

You: ahh I think it's weird that it's so closely tied to wealth

Stranger: not really the uk ruling class make it prtty obvious to us peasnts that its a ruling class fake democracy

Stranger: unlike the usa where everybody is supposed classless

You: right

You: I guess that's a fair statement

Stranger: but yeah fuck the queen

Stranger: how was the guy defedning monarchy?

You: oh he sounded kind of weird

You: like how god and the monarchy is essential for uk's stability and being

Stranger: pfft

You: he didn't really explain much

Stranger: both are irelevant nowadays

You: just pointed out that france and us are chaotic, according to him because there is no monarchy

Stranger: oh yeah thats totally

Stranger: why

You: yeah lol

Stranger: if only they had a monarchy then there owuld be no class and racial conflict

You: so how far left are you?

Stranger: very far

You: anarchist?

Stranger: nope left communist

Stranger: basically anti stalinist communist

You: what does your ideal government look like?

Stranger: well until you have a relatively stateless socialism you have a dictatorship of the proleterait

Stranger: and that has an armed population as the army and has direct democracy and a representive democracy who are payed wages simualr to that of a workmans

Stranger: in brief

You: mhm and membership has a criteria that you must be working class?

Stranger: membership of the democratic process yep

Stranger: a worker

You: mhm

Stranger: not necearily poor

You: what is the exact definition of working class btw?

Stranger: sombody who doesnt own and live off capitlist property

Stranger: or is a cpatilsit in other respects

Stranger: like an investor

Stranger: businessmen landlords and bankers

You: hmm I feel like it's hard for me to draw parallels

You: I know a pharmacist friend

You: who rents his place

You: for extra cash

Stranger: well when we have the revolution i doubt he'll be locked up or anything but youknow

Stranger: hes just a small landlord i guess

Stranger: supplemetning work income

You: so would people just discouraged from doing that kind of stuff?

Stranger: well hosuing will be nationalised as an early step

Stranger: so you wont have to

You: mhm

Stranger: making rent equal to bills

You: my parents also have investments

You: for like retirement

You: and just in general

Stranger: sure

You: was curious what would happen to those

Stranger: well i mean by investor sombody who is rich and does it for a job

You: ah kay

Stranger: the socialsit pension ting will be good anyhow

You: mhm

You: do you think that's it necessary for the world to follow this model? Or do you think that it can still work with just a communist state on it's own?

Stranger: nah for a lot of reasons you cant have it in one or a few states surrounded by cpaitlsit ones

Stranger: for one a DOTP surrounded by cpatilist states is forced to act like one to compete

Stranger: and therefore exploit other countries and its own labourers to the max

You: right, I was curious about that actually

Stranger: that was trotsky's argument

You: mhm

Stranger: he said u cant have 'socialsism in one country' because you have to first have international DOTP

You: dotp stands for?

Stranger: or you just become a state cpaitlist state like stalin

You: dictatorship of the prol.?

Stranger: dictatorship of the proletariat

Stranger: yep

You: mhm, that makes a lot of sense

Stranger: yep

Stranger: DOTP being when workers hold the state but not the economy

Stranger: the economy is still in private hands

You: right

You: I think I mix up all the varieties of socialism and communism

Stranger: yh DOTP isnt so much a variety but a transition

Stranger: from cpaitlism to socialism/com

You: mhm

You: I feel like I think about human nature cynically

Stranger: oh go on

You: as in, I'm skeptical of being satisfied with equality

You: *ppl being

Stranger: well tehy certainly arnt satified by inequality so how bad can it really get?

You: mhm true

Stranger: we dont mean absolute equality

Stranger: just equality of opporutunity to realise ur best self

You: idk if this is school bias or anything, but when we learn about communism, it's often framed that the party just ends up with all the wealth

You: or power

Stranger: theres a reason that idea of so called communism is taught rlly

Stranger: mainly cos of porpaganda but theres some truth

Stranger: under lenin the state was definitely a semi deictatorship of a few workers parties

Stranger: but with a democratic mechanism and worker councils to elect them

You: hm

You: *mhm

Stranger: with the intention of educating a largely illitarate peasant russia into a democratic socialsit society

Stranger: but after the vicotry of stalin after lenins death, whatever redistribution of power was dropped and centrlasing power in the party and in stalin was the priority

You: right

Stranger: so there is a history to it

You: I feel like I was thought that there was a component of ideological purity -- like, if you expressed greater loyalty to the party, you could get more stuff

You: like better food tickets or cars or stuff

You: *taught

Stranger: sure teh soviet union during and after stalin was definitely a class society

You: mhm, how do you avoid class from rearising?

Stranger: you dont centralise power in bureacracy

Stranger: and make it mroe acoutnable

Stranger: you arm the popualtion

Stranger: make durable directly democratic mechanisms

Stranger: accountability at all level

You: so you're saying like enshrining freedom of speech / freedom of arms in the system?

Stranger: im not a freedom of speech absolutist but sure

Stranger: its very important

You: wasn't China kinda of freedom of speech until tianmensquare, were they?

Stranger: ha no

Stranger: you got tortured if you spoke out

You: ah kay

Stranger: same as soviet union really

Stranger: mao wasnt masively different

You: I'm just thinking of the blm protests in the US

Stranger: yh

You: when ppl feel like change isn't happening

You: then they can get violent

Stranger: yep

You: was just curious how your government would handle that

Stranger: well the governmetn and the people are intrinsically merged

Stranger: but it depends like waht the situation would be

You: mhm I mean technically there's universal suffrage in the US but not everyone votes

Stranger: yep

Stranger: electoral college too

You: and I think minority parties can sometimes be the loudest and most opinionated

Stranger: yh

You: so even with a proletariat government I think there might still be disagreement

Stranger: yh

Stranger: for sure

Stranger: and debate

Stranger: whats ur point

You: mhm idk

Stranger: aight sitl idk the answers

You: yeah it's interesting

Stranger: what are u taught abotu socialism in schools

You: mhm, I guess just the things I said?

You: I think we studied east germany and the ussr

Stranger: ah k

Stranger: yep

You: what life was like

You: to live there

Stranger: sure and if you trying and feed everyone this is waht happens type shite

Stranger: you cant be nice with the economy

You: mhm I don't think my teachers tried to make extremely biased conclusions or anything

You: but the curriculum itself could be biased I think

Stranger: k yeah same

Stranger: yeah fr

Stranger: we dont learn at all about the british empire

You: yup

Stranger: like not once

Stranger: or really any british history beyond knights and castles

You: actually in world history class my teacher commented that I was beginning to sound "anti-american" lol

Stranger: haha good

Stranger: anti american what a word

Stranger: being anti imperialist and anti racist is being anti british too

You: lol

Stranger: tells u what they think about britishness

Stranger: its not culture but power

Stranger: which is a load of bs

You: mhm

Stranger: what did you say to teacher

You: idk I'm not very nationalist

You: I didn't say anything, I'm not really the kind of person to argue

Stranger: neither but i like uk just not enough to block refugees to preserve it

Stranger: like some wacko patriots are

You: mhm

Stranger: they act like the uks not been 15% non white since like 1940

You: mhm

You: what do you think of their opinion that a country should have a right to control their own culture/ethnicities?

Stranger: erm

Stranger: well thats tough

Stranger: i think the ideal of direct dmeocracy and a reactioanry population is contradictory

Stranger: and therefore maybe u need more centralised leadership there

You: I think I heard a scenario of belgium or something wanting to block the construction of mosques in like a historical district or something

You: to preserve their national culture/history

Stranger: yep idk

You: yeah idk either

Stranger: but like how would direct democrayc work in somalia

Stranger: or saudi arabia

Stranger: thats a tough question

Stranger: would men use it to repress women

You: mhm yup

You: or well, there are several states that have a democracy

Stranger: its like india was basically a dicatroship for its first 20 years

You: and they voted to impose state religion

You: state religious laws

You: that kind of thing

Stranger: basically cos it would be a bloodbath

Stranger: of relgion and caste

Stranger: so the governmetn had to go against the people to do whats the long term good

You: I think it's sometimes hard to have foresight about what the "long term good" is though

You: like everybody things they are doing things for long term good

You: *thinks

Stranger: well in indias caste removing caste racism and relgious bigotry was a big thing

Stranger: and many people died due to it

You: mhm

You: I think it's really hard for me to know what is "right"

Stranger: and i think general equality is a good thing impose against a population

Stranger: if they dont want it

Stranger: thats the only way change has ever come

You: mhm although I think indoctrination is always possible

Stranger: eh

You: I mean, this is kind of a hot take, but Western values are indoctrinated

Stranger: yeahthey are

You: similarly speaking you could indoctrinate capitalistic values or communist values

Stranger: some are right some are wrong

Stranger: not succesfully

You: and I think the ppl who grow up with whatever they are indoctrinated with are generally happy

You: and support the views they grow up with

Stranger: yeah true

You: although I think it's sad for whoever gets left out of the system

Stranger: like anti deisicimination laws are passed despite a population

Stranger: for a long term good

You: mhm

You: yeah idk governments are hard haha

Stranger: haha yes

Stranger: thats why were still talking about it

You: mhm

You: I don't really know what to think about ppl who support religious states

You: like indonesia has that problem

Stranger: theyre idiots

You: like they want their state to become religious

Stranger: ik snd prolly will

You: but if I imagine myself in their shoes

You: I think they just want to be closer to their religion

You: which is like a personal value

You: like I'm secular, so things like freedom and equality mean a lot to me

Stranger: truw

You: but I can also imagine a different world were idk god and faith matter a lot to me

You: we have pretty significant freedom of religion battles in the us

Stranger: same]

Stranger: if i didnt grow up in suhc an athiest school and get bullied for it id be hardcore jesus

You: oh your family is religious?

Stranger: yep

You: mhm I was reading about the us lgbt anti-discrimination ruling earlier

Stranger: yeah

You: the religious schools here are worried about being affected

You: like they don't want to hire gay teachers

Stranger: good

You: bc they're a religious school

Stranger: get w the program schools

Stranger: idk if lenins polcy of bruning churches was good but you have to have soem kind of athiest government

You: mhm I think anti-discrimination is good, but I feel like I can understand their resistance of feeling like they can't teach their religion the way they want

Stranger: sure yeah

You: idk most things I don't know what to think lol

Stranger: but think about if they dont get agy teachers

Stranger: anti discimination laws dont work

You: hm?

Stranger: cos u can jsut say u didnt disciminate and taht it

You: ohh no it still matters

You: like imagine you are a religious school

You: and a pastor applies and says they are a gay priest

You: and you don't want to hire them

You: they can sue bc discrimination

Stranger: maybe but its a relgious school why u even applying

You: mhm some ppl kind of want to change christianity I think

You: like there are pastors who are much more sympathetic to lgbt

Stranger: eh still

Stranger: lictus and that

Stranger: levictus

You: yeah idk

You: most of the churches in my area are pro-lgbt

Stranger: pretty sure my preist is closeted

You: aww

Stranger: hes very camp

You: camp ?

Stranger: and went to cambridge

Stranger: femenine

You: ahh

Stranger: yep

You: yeah religion is an odd place in politics for me

You: like it's often at the root of weird stuff

Stranger: oh yeah

Stranger: are u relgious

You: that runs counter to like modern science common sense

You: no

You: well, I'm like 20% spiritual I guess

You: but I'm not religious

Stranger: yep

Stranger: never got the difference

You: between spiritual and religious?

Stranger: yep

You: oh, for me, religious is like adhering to a religion, or denomination, or religious practice

You: spiritual is like vaguely believe in something

You: *belieiving

You: without doing anything about it

You have disconnected.

[scottmapess]

BITCOIN WILL GO PARABOLIC | Robert Kiyosaki Author of Rich Dad Poor Dad

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Hey, everybody, Maddie here with altcoin BI’s Happy Thursday. Hope you’re having a great week. We’re discussing today new comments from the author, best selling author, I should say, Robert Kiyosaki, who say there’s a very good chance that Bitcoin may go parabolic in response to what’s happening right now with the economy, with Coronavirus, with this, quote, the unlimited money supply that the Federal Reserve and other central banks are providing. Robert Kiyosaki, of course, is the author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad. We’re gonna take a look at his comments and everything that’s been said. We’re also going to take a look at some of the proposals that are on the table here, courtesy of Business Insider. A little bit of an update from Washington. House Democrats introduced a plan to pay Americans $2000 a month until the economy recovers from covered 19. And we’ll also see related to that on Newsbeat T-C dot.com bitcoin sees a rocketing new user in-flow bill. Looming economic crisis spur adoption. We’re never going to root for an economic crisis to be the catalyst for a cryptocurrency and bitcoin. However, these two things are related, so I don’t want to be a cheerleader for doomsday or the apocalypse. But I think that is going to provide an opportunity for bitcoin to respond if stuff really hits the fan. So we’ll take a look at those stories will also first take a look here at the markets on Quinn market cap dot.com, 200 point five billion dollars, total market cap things up pretty handsomely since yesterday in these last 24 hours, Bitcoin up 3.5, 5 percent. Ethereum up seven-point nine five percent. Other projects similarly up three, four, five, six, seven percent. Oh, yes. Notably up eight-point eight, three percent. At the time of this recording, Bitcoin sits at six thousand nine hundred ninety-nine dollars. Still just shy of that 7 K resistance point dominance right now is sixty-three point nine percent, which is a little bit lower than we’ve been typically seeing lately. So according to Robert Kiyosaki and he’s, by the way, the author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad, which is one of the world’s best selling personal finance books, he said that Bitcoin stands to go parabolic after Cauvin 19 ends. And this is a tweet from April 13th. There’s a series of tweets, actually, he called the current pandemic a great thing for Bitcoin. He also issued the following quote. The reason I endorse Bitcoin is just for one reason. You’re not part of the system. So let’s take a look at what he said specifically. Again, here from the 13th of April is dead broke, referring to the Federal Reserve hidden in recent 2.2 trillion dollar Congress rescue bill was buried, a 425 billion dollar amount for the Fed. Fed has been bailing out the world since 2008. And that’s referring to the 2008 economic crisis, the collapse of Lehman Brothers and others in the housing market. Fed has been bailing out the world since that time. Who bails out the Fed? Now we know we are. Why are Fed and Treasury hiding this from us? Buy more gold, silver and Bitcoin screwed in capital letters. And then a little bit more recently here from the 15th of April. Corona crisis. Great for gold, silver bitcoin. U.S. Government printing ten trillion dollars in fake U.S. dollars to save U.S. Fed printing 10 trillion dollars to save shadow banks. Dollar and bull market for now when the dollar bear market begins. Gold. Silver. Bitcoin parabolic. Best investments today. Do not miss out. And then from later on that afternoon, on the 15th of April. Gold and silver gods. Money. Bitcoin. Open-source. People’s money. Bitcoin. Gold and silver. Important because not controlled by Fed, Treasury or Wall Street. A very important point. Not controlled by anybody other than the algorithm. Get it? Even if unemployed, real silver still available at about $25 for U.S. Silver Eagle, everyone can afford $25. Get it? Some very strong comments. And related to those is this piece on you Dot today. Rich Dad, Poor Dad author regrets not buying bitcoin back in 2009. Well, don’t we all? But a little bit more realistically here. Also, you got today Bitcoin beyond Fed’s control. Anyone can buy. Fraction according to rich dad. Poor dad. You know, he said that you can put twenty-five dollars into a silver eagle. And I believe that’s a coin. But it says sovereign investment, essentially. So if you could put twenty-five dollars into that, you could put twenty-five dollars into a lot of things. And Bitcoin is the isn’t rather the only thing you should be putting perhaps some money into. But everybody if they can afford that. Twenty-five dollars worth of silver. I think it stands to reason. Hey, they can also for twenty-five dollars worth of bitcoin. That’s what’s nice about it being so divisible. So this article here doesn’t really go into much more than what we’ve already seen. It kind of sums up the tweets. We have never really covered Mr Key. Sjakie Again, author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad. I really didn’t know he had this kind of a mindset or that he was into Bitcoin, a cryptocurrency. I had heard before that he was into precious metals as hedges against an economy that maybe he didn’t have too much confidence in. But this, I think, spells it out very clearly. He’s perhaps not a frontline bitcoin bull, but he certainly believes in the idea and the system over the fiat currency system. That is for sure. And I’m a. Loti of the men, I grew up reading some of his material, so this is very encouraging to see. I really like it. It’s heartening news as far as I’m concerned. Let us know your thoughts about it, guys, in the comments below. One last week here before switching gears, a Fed cannot go broke in theory, but people can lose confidence in the Fed and the U.S. dollar. The four hundred and twenty-five billion dollars the U.S. gave the Fed secretly will expand to 4.2 5 trillion of fake dollars into the economy for over 9 trillion dollars in fake Fed money, monopoly money. In other words, when confidence goes. Game over and the International Monetary Fund steps in IMF stands for. I am effort related to everything that Robert Kiyosaki is talking about. Is this news? CHRISSY hear of business? Insider.com House Democrats introduced plan to pay Americans $2000 a month until the economy recovers from COVID 19. This is getting into rather a controversial territory. We’ve kind of covered the relief packages that have been put forward by the Federal Reserve, by President Donald Trump and by other government officials. And I understand that you know, the idea of a stimulus package or relief package can be important in the short term, especially for people that have been laid off. The argument goes that essentially the government is asking you not to participate in the economy. They’re asking you to stay home. They’re asking you to help flatten the curve of this covered 19 pandemic. OK, that’s fair. So if the government wants to impose that rule on you and ban you from participating in what you regularly do to earn an income, then I think it’s fair. It stands to reason that the government should compensate you for that or provide relief to some effect. OK, I get that. But as I’ve discussed before. If the economy is not producing anything. If we’re not productive and we’re not generating actual wealth. If we’re just redistributing what’s already there. All of these stimulus funds, the longer they go on, the more we’re borrowing from ourselves in the future. And that is a problem. And that’s something that personally I stand against. There’s also the argument that at a certain point, the pandemic is perhaps ongoing, but it’s manageable. And the damage done by extending the quarantine and turning a recession perhaps into a depression, that damage is worse even in terms of the death toll. Quantitatively, that’s actually worse than anything the pandemic would have naturally provided on its own. So at a certain point, even if we’re not back to 100 percent, even if the pandemic is still lingering, I think there is an argument to open the economy back up because of that completely collapses. And that’s a very bleak picture. That’s something that’s far worse, again, in my opinion, than whatever the pandemic could muster on its own. But, you know, with that kind of preface aside, I want to ask you guys about what you think about, generally speaking, about these $2000. Whether it’s two thousand, one thousand, more or less, whatever. But what you guys think about this kind of almost universal basic income were in a way experimenting with it. And the catalyst for that, of course, has been Coronavirus. But I just don’t understand the logic here. I keep seeing people personally in my social circle on Facebook pushing for this, praising the idea that now, you know, this is great opportunities to the bed where I am in Canada. We’re not already under a UBI system. And people commenting with a lot of snark that all maybe this will show and this will finally turn the tide and convince people. Generally speaking, I’m not into wealth redistribution. I’m into wealth creation strategies. But that’s just me. But even let’s know for the sake of argument, I’ll play devil’s advocate here. Even if the idea is to address the issue of wealth inequality. So even if the economy can function, let’s say you’re still productive as a nation. I don’t think you would be if everybody were to receive UBI. But let’s say for the sake of argument that that was the case. And the idea is just to get everybody on the same page, to kind of prop up those that are struggling in society and provide a UBI ice, that everybody has something available and everybody has to spend money in their pocket. Well, again, my big concern is that if everybody has automatically generated funds that they’re not going to be producing anymore. And there are all kinds of other implications that follow. For example, the regular cost of groceries and day to day essentials are going to rise because the cost of labour is going to go up. But again, all of that aside, for the time being, if you just want everybody to be equal and everybody to have a good source of income. Okay, I get it. That’s a noble intention. That’s a good-hearted goal. But are you not allowed to then invest that money? What happens to those people that if they get that $2000 a month, maybe they. I don’t know. Maybe they win the lottery or maybe they invest in wildly successful stocks. Maybe they start a business and then maybe that $2000 per month snowballs into twenty thousand two hundred thousand dollars a month. Next thing you know, they’re millionaires. I mean, how do you compensate for that? How how do you, through government authority, dictate that everybody should be on the same level of wealth? Financially, it’s just not possible. And what happens if you’re a drug addict? Are you not able to also just blow all your money on drugs or alcohol? Or maybe you make bad decisions, maybe you lose it at the racetrack? To me, there’s no quick and easy solution to quality. I don’t think it exists. That’s a hard truth and a hard pill that. Many of us haven’t yet accepted, but that is my personal take so long rant aside, we have this news about allocating $2000 per month to every American citizen since the bill currently being discussed in Washington. So in brief, the Emergency Money for the People Act, introduced by Rep. Tim Ryan and Ro Kanha, would give $2000 U.S. a month to Americans over the age of 16 who make less than one hundred and thirty thousand dollars a year. So the vast majority of people, the payments would continue for at least six months and would last until unemployment falls to pre coronavirus levels, quote, a one time U.S. Twelve hundred dollar check isn’t going to cut it, CARNEY said. Americans need sustained cash infusions for the duration of the crisis in order to come out on the other side alive, healthy and ready to go back to work. I mean, already I don’t agree with the premise here. Let’s say the Coronavirus has done serious damage to the economy and that clause here about the unemployment level. Let’s say that doesn’t return to standard levels for two years, three years, five years. So these individuals, according to these proposed rules, are just going to continue collecting $2000 a month for five years until unemployment figures retrace to what they were. And by the way, for them to retrace is going to be very significant because they were at historical lows before the Coronavirus started. So already I disagree with some of the terms here and some of the rhetoric that’s being thrown around. I do agree in the short term that there is room to provide relief. As I said, the federal government is asking us to stay home. They’re asking us not to engage in our careers and our jobs in most cases. Therefore, if that is the case and that’s something that that is enforced, then, yes, they ought to compensate by helping us out. But there’s got to be an end to it. It’s gonna have a very strict time horizon and it’s got to have a due date or at least an aspirational one where we can all kind of get back to things and get back to work and life as normal because the longer this continues, the more the economic impacts are gonna end. The bad economics impact is what I’m saying. The more those are going to outweigh any natural or organic impacts, including the death toll caused by the pandemic itself. Finally, here on Newsbeat DC, dot.com bitcoin sees rocketing new user in-flow. Is Will looming economic crisis spur adoption again? Nobody’s rooting for a global pandemic or an economic crash or an apocalypse in order to help prop up the price and the performance of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. However, they do kind of go hand in hand for a lot of the libertarian-oriented individuals such as myself that feel that there’s too much involvement already in government when governments start to fail, that’s when people like myself when economies start to falter, that’s when people like myself start to see a little bit, perhaps put a little bit more into Bitcoin, perhaps get excited about it. It’s not to say I’m rooting against the system, but unfortunately, there is a correlation between the two. And I think the argument can be made here that the economic crisis will spur adoption will spur more important than anything, the legitimacy of Bitcoin. So check out this article in full. Let us know your thoughts about that in the comments below. But that about wraps it up for today. Everybody, let me know your thoughts about those mini rants, I went on. But as always, to be sure, you’re following us on all the regular social media channels. Keep checking back into altcoin buys dot I o for all the latest. Go ahead. Like subscribe share and at the belt receive notifications of course, if you’ve enjoyed today’s video. Best of luck. If you choose to invest on this Thursday. Have a great one, everybody, and we’ll see you again tomorrow on Friday, hopefully in our next video. Take care.

source https://www.cryptosharks.net/bitcoin-will-go-parabolic-robert-kiyosaki/ source https://cryptosharks1.blogspot.com/2020/04/bitcoin-will-go-parabolic-robert.html

[heatherrdavis1]

BITCOIN WILL GO PARABOLIC | Robert Kiyosaki Author of Rich Dad Poor Dad

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Hey, everybody, Maddie here with altcoin BI’s Happy Thursday. Hope you’re having a great week. We’re discussing today new comments from the author, best selling author, I should say, Robert Kiyosaki, who say there’s a very good chance that Bitcoin may go parabolic in response to what’s happening right now with the economy, with Coronavirus, with this, quote, the unlimited money supply that the Federal Reserve and other central banks are providing. Robert Kiyosaki, of course, is the author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad. We’re gonna take a look at his comments and everything that’s been said. We’re also going to take a look at some of the proposals that are on the table here, courtesy of Business Insider. A little bit of an update from Washington. House Democrats introduced a plan to pay Americans $2000 a month until the economy recovers from covered 19. And we’ll also see related to that on Newsbeat T-C dot.com bitcoin sees a rocketing new user in-flow bill. Looming economic crisis spur adoption. We’re never going to root for an economic crisis to be the catalyst for a cryptocurrency and bitcoin. However, these two things are related, so I don’t want to be a cheerleader for doomsday or the apocalypse. But I think that is going to provide an opportunity for bitcoin to respond if stuff really hits the fan. So we’ll take a look at those stories will also first take a look here at the markets on Quinn market cap dot.com, 200 point five billion dollars, total market cap things up pretty handsomely since yesterday in these last 24 hours, Bitcoin up 3.5, 5 percent. Ethereum up seven-point nine five percent. Other projects similarly up three, four, five, six, seven percent. Oh, yes. Notably up eight-point eight, three percent. At the time of this recording, Bitcoin sits at six thousand nine hundred ninety-nine dollars. Still just shy of that 7 K resistance point dominance right now is sixty-three point nine percent, which is a little bit lower than we’ve been typically seeing lately. So according to Robert Kiyosaki and he’s, by the way, the author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad, which is one of the world’s best selling personal finance books, he said that Bitcoin stands to go parabolic after Cauvin 19 ends. And this is a tweet from April 13th. There’s a series of tweets, actually, he called the current pandemic a great thing for Bitcoin. He also issued the following quote. The reason I endorse Bitcoin is just for one reason. You’re not part of the system. So let’s take a look at what he said specifically. Again, here from the 13th of April is dead broke, referring to the Federal Reserve hidden in recent 2.2 trillion dollar Congress rescue bill was buried, a 425 billion dollar amount for the Fed. Fed has been bailing out the world since 2008. And that’s referring to the 2008 economic crisis, the collapse of Lehman Brothers and others in the housing market. Fed has been bailing out the world since that time. Who bails out the Fed? Now we know we are. Why are Fed and Treasury hiding this from us? Buy more gold, silver and Bitcoin screwed in capital letters. And then a little bit more recently here from the 15th of April. Corona crisis. Great for gold, silver bitcoin. U.S. Government printing ten trillion dollars in fake U.S. dollars to save U.S. Fed printing 10 trillion dollars to save shadow banks. Dollar and bull market for now when the dollar bear market begins. Gold. Silver. Bitcoin parabolic. Best investments today. Do not miss out. And then from later on that afternoon, on the 15th of April. Gold and silver gods. Money. Bitcoin. Open-source. People’s money. Bitcoin. Gold and silver. Important because not controlled by Fed, Treasury or Wall Street. A very important point. Not controlled by anybody other than the algorithm. Get it? Even if unemployed, real silver still available at about $25 for U.S. Silver Eagle, everyone can afford $25. Get it? Some very strong comments. And related to those is this piece on you Dot today. Rich Dad, Poor Dad author regrets not buying bitcoin back in 2009. Well, don’t we all? But a little bit more realistically here. Also, you got today Bitcoin beyond Fed’s control. Anyone can buy. Fraction according to rich dad. Poor dad. You know, he said that you can put twenty-five dollars into a silver eagle. And I believe that’s a coin. But it says sovereign investment, essentially. So if you could put twenty-five dollars into that, you could put twenty-five dollars into a lot of things. And Bitcoin is the isn’t rather the only thing you should be putting perhaps some money into. But everybody if they can afford that. Twenty-five dollars worth of silver. I think it stands to reason. Hey, they can also for twenty-five dollars worth of bitcoin. That’s what’s nice about it being so divisible. So this article here doesn’t really go into much more than what we’ve already seen. It kind of sums up the tweets. We have never really covered Mr Key. Sjakie Again, author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad. I really didn’t know he had this kind of a mindset or that he was into Bitcoin, a cryptocurrency. I had heard before that he was into precious metals as hedges against an economy that maybe he didn’t have too much confidence in. But this, I think, spells it out very clearly. He’s perhaps not a frontline bitcoin bull, but he certainly believes in the idea and the system over the fiat currency system. That is for sure. And I’m a. Loti of the men, I grew up reading some of his material, so this is very encouraging to see. I really like it. It’s heartening news as far as I’m concerned. Let us know your thoughts about it, guys, in the comments below. One last week here before switching gears, a Fed cannot go broke in theory, but people can lose confidence in the Fed and the U.S. dollar. The four hundred and twenty-five billion dollars the U.S. gave the Fed secretly will expand to 4.2 5 trillion of fake dollars into the economy for over 9 trillion dollars in fake Fed money, monopoly money. In other words, when confidence goes. Game over and the International Monetary Fund steps in IMF stands for. I am effort related to everything that Robert Kiyosaki is talking about. Is this news? CHRISSY hear of business? Insider.com House Democrats introduced plan to pay Americans $2000 a month until the economy recovers from COVID 19. This is getting into rather a controversial territory. We’ve kind of covered the relief packages that have been put forward by the Federal Reserve, by President Donald Trump and by other government officials. And I understand that you know, the idea of a stimulus package or relief package can be important in the short term, especially for people that have been laid off. The argument goes that essentially the government is asking you not to participate in the economy. They’re asking you to stay home. They’re asking you to help flatten the curve of this covered 19 pandemic. OK, that’s fair. So if the government wants to impose that rule on you and ban you from participating in what you regularly do to earn an income, then I think it’s fair. It stands to reason that the government should compensate you for that or provide relief to some effect. OK, I get that. But as I’ve discussed before. If the economy is not producing anything. If we’re not productive and we’re not generating actual wealth. If we’re just redistributing what’s already there. All of these stimulus funds, the longer they go on, the more we’re borrowing from ourselves in the future. And that is a problem. And that’s something that personally I stand against. There’s also the argument that at a certain point, the pandemic is perhaps ongoing, but it’s manageable. And the damage done by extending the quarantine and turning a recession perhaps into a depression, that damage is worse even in terms of the death toll. Quantitatively, that’s actually worse than anything the pandemic would have naturally provided on its own. So at a certain point, even if we’re not back to 100 percent, even if the pandemic is still lingering, I think there is an argument to open the economy back up because of that completely collapses. And that’s a very bleak picture. That’s something that’s far worse, again, in my opinion, than whatever the pandemic could muster on its own. But, you know, with that kind of preface aside, I want to ask you guys about what you think about, generally speaking, about these $2000. Whether it’s two thousand, one thousand, more or less, whatever. But what you guys think about this kind of almost universal basic income were in a way experimenting with it. And the catalyst for that, of course, has been Coronavirus. But I just don’t understand the logic here. I keep seeing people personally in my social circle on Facebook pushing for this, praising the idea that now, you know, this is great opportunities to the bed where I am in Canada. We’re not already under a UBI system. And people commenting with a lot of snark that all maybe this will show and this will finally turn the tide and convince people. Generally speaking, I’m not into wealth redistribution. I’m into wealth creation strategies. But that’s just me. But even let’s know for the sake of argument, I’ll play devil’s advocate here. Even if the idea is to address the issue of wealth inequality. So even if the economy can function, let’s say you’re still productive as a nation. I don’t think you would be if everybody were to receive UBI. But let’s say for the sake of argument that that was the case. And the idea is just to get everybody on the same page, to kind of prop up those that are struggling in society and provide a UBI ice, that everybody has something available and everybody has to spend money in their pocket. Well, again, my big concern is that if everybody has automatically generated funds that they’re not going to be producing anymore. And there are all kinds of other implications that follow. For example, the regular cost of groceries and day to day essentials are going to rise because the cost of labour is going to go up. But again, all of that aside, for the time being, if you just want everybody to be equal and everybody to have a good source of income. Okay, I get it. That’s a noble intention. That’s a good-hearted goal. But are you not allowed to then invest that money? What happens to those people that if they get that $2000 a month, maybe they. I don’t know. Maybe they win the lottery or maybe they invest in wildly successful stocks. Maybe they start a business and then maybe that $2000 per month snowballs into twenty thousand two hundred thousand dollars a month. Next thing you know, they’re millionaires. I mean, how do you compensate for that? How how do you, through government authority, dictate that everybody should be on the same level of wealth? Financially, it’s just not possible. And what happens if you’re a drug addict? Are you not able to also just blow all your money on drugs or alcohol? Or maybe you make bad decisions, maybe you lose it at the racetrack? To me, there’s no quick and easy solution to quality. I don’t think it exists. That’s a hard truth and a hard pill that. Many of us haven’t yet accepted, but that is my personal take so long rant aside, we have this news about allocating $2000 per month to every American citizen since the bill currently being discussed in Washington. So in brief, the Emergency Money for the People Act, introduced by Rep. Tim Ryan and Ro Kanha, would give $2000 U.S. a month to Americans over the age of 16 who make less than one hundred and thirty thousand dollars a year. So the vast majority of people, the payments would continue for at least six months and would last until unemployment falls to pre coronavirus levels, quote, a one time U.S. Twelve hundred dollar check isn’t going to cut it, CARNEY said. Americans need sustained cash infusions for the duration of the crisis in order to come out on the other side alive, healthy and ready to go back to work. I mean, already I don’t agree with the premise here. Let’s say the Coronavirus has done serious damage to the economy and that clause here about the unemployment level. Let’s say that doesn’t return to standard levels for two years, three years, five years. So these individuals, according to these proposed rules, are just going to continue collecting $2000 a month for five years until unemployment figures retrace to what they were. And by the way, for them to retrace is going to be very significant because they were at historical lows before the Coronavirus started. So already I disagree with some of the terms here and some of the rhetoric that’s being thrown around. I do agree in the short term that there is room to provide relief. As I said, the federal government is asking us to stay home. They’re asking us not to engage in our careers and our jobs in most cases. Therefore, if that is the case and that’s something that that is enforced, then, yes, they ought to compensate by helping us out. But there’s got to be an end to it. It’s gonna have a very strict time horizon and it’s got to have a due date or at least an aspirational one where we can all kind of get back to things and get back to work and life as normal because the longer this continues, the more the economic impacts are gonna end. The bad economics impact is what I’m saying. The more those are going to outweigh any natural or organic impacts, including the death toll caused by the pandemic itself. Finally, here on Newsbeat DC, dot.com bitcoin sees rocketing new user in-flow. Is Will looming economic crisis spur adoption again? Nobody’s rooting for a global pandemic or an economic crash or an apocalypse in order to help prop up the price and the performance of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. However, they do kind of go hand in hand for a lot of the libertarian-oriented individuals such as myself that feel that there’s too much involvement already in government when governments start to fail, that’s when people like myself when economies start to falter, that’s when people like myself start to see a little bit, perhaps put a little bit more into Bitcoin, perhaps get excited about it. It’s not to say I’m rooting against the system, but unfortunately, there is a correlation between the two. And I think the argument can be made here that the economic crisis will spur adoption will spur more important than anything, the legitimacy of Bitcoin. So check out this article in full. Let us know your thoughts about that in the comments below. But that about wraps it up for today. Everybody, let me know your thoughts about those mini rants, I went on. But as always, to be sure, you’re following us on all the regular social media channels. Keep checking back into altcoin buys dot I o for all the latest. Go ahead. Like subscribe share and at the belt receive notifications of course, if you’ve enjoyed today’s video. Best of luck. If you choose to invest on this Thursday. Have a great one, everybody, and we’ll see you again tomorrow on Friday, hopefully in our next video. Take care.

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