Nah.
(Baldfaced assertion refutes baldfaced assertion.)
How terribly witty. What community college did you flunk out of?
I hear the echoing tread of moderators coming down the hall.
And here we are. Or at least me.
TPK, it’s not allowed to insult other posters outside of the BBQ Pit. This is a warning. Please don’t do it again.
How is mass immigration an existential threat to our nation? Please include your definition of existential.
Really? You honestly mean to say that someone has to explain to you why mass immigration will sooner or later swamp the boat? That’s like explaining to someone that the sky isn’t really green, and I prefer to spare myself the aggravation of trying. As for the definition of existential, I see no need to define words when I haven’t used them in unusual ways. Life is too short for nitpicking and splitting hairs.
Let’s just zoom in on one thing here…
So when it comes to the age of the earth, we’re talking about something which is clearly defined, has one meaning, and is knowable. We’re dealing with matters of facts. It’s not a matter of labels or definitions - creationists and geologists agree on what is meant by “year”, “earth”, “age”, and more when one group says 4.5 billion and the other says 6000. Their disagreement is empirical in nature, and one side is, to put it bluntly, ignoring the science.
Meanwhile, the definition of the labels “man” and “woman” is not generally agreed upon in debates about how to classify trans people. In fact, they’re the core substance. The debate is generally all about what “man” and “woman” mean, and how to draw those dividing lines. Some people believe those lines should be drawn strictly along the line of “who has what chromosomes”. Others believe gender identity matters more.
Treating these two debates as in any way “equivalent” is ridiculous. They’re fundamentally different things - a scientific debate over the correct interpretation of empirical facts, vs. a philosophical debate over the correct use and meaning of words. Someone who is “wrong” on the science is just objectively wrong. I’m not sure it’s possible for there to be a “right” or “wrong” way to use words, as long as you’re understood - i.e. the descriptivists in this cartoon.
I don’t believe there is a coherent definition of “man” or “woman” that doesn’t eventually run into weird edge cases. Any straight man would fuck an XY woman and never even notice, because you don’t pull out a microscope every time you get a boner. So I split the difference in the direction that doesn’t aggravate mental disorders or invalidate people’s identity and define it based on gender identity. And I will aggressively push back against people who insist that my friend Rose is a man - she’s soft and pretty and cute and misgendering her actually really hurts her and I won’t fuckin’ stand for it. Additionally, I’ll point and laugh at people who insist that Shawn Stinson is a woman. I mean, c’mon! Look at him! That’s 200 pounds of pure Alabama beefcake! How do you get something so simple so wrong? 
…Of course, I get the feeling this argument isn’t going to reach you particularly well, because it’s basically all about linguistics, and…
…In fact, I wrote this and the preceding sentence first. So let it be known that this entire post was one big exercise in making myself look and feel smart because goddamn it I’m having a really shitty day and I need to feel smart. Someone please validate me. Anyone. Please.
So…no actual argument then? Probably just as well, given that it is way off topic.
Back on point: unusually I find myself agreeing with adaher and his note that “Religion and tribalism end up mixing a lot.” You can try to dissect the nuances of the Biblical positions but ultimately it comes down to who’s part of their tribe and who isn’t (and how God is their Big Brother who is going to come and beat up the rest of us).
Yes, I do need someone to explain why they think mass immigration is so bad, what qualifies as “mass immigration”, and why they think a metaphor based on small craft can be applied appropriately to the third largest country in the world. There are two or three common uses of “existential”, so I think a request for clarification is reasonable. If you aren’t willing to discuss your position in detail, why are you posting it?
And if you think “Life is too short for nitpicking and splitting hairs”, you are on the wrong message board.
“It’s so obvious that I don’t have to defend my position with actual facts and reason!”
Yawn. So tiresome.
To be fair, when some people say “existential threat” what they mean is “I don’t like change”, as if change - including demographic change - wasn’t and hadn’t always been constant. The amount of mass migration required to pose an actual existential threat to America would be **at a minimum **in the tens of millions over a very short period of time. Less than that, and what you’ve got is just another in a long series of migration waves in American history.
Having repeated the assertion, do you have a cite to support it beyond, “I would say?”
quote by lonesome crow:
#139
Sorry, i missed the editing button, tried to copy and paste from wiki, i meant;
“one God in three Divine Persons”
He doesn’t. It would be a hard thing to prove. It also really depends upon the time period. You can divide Prohibition work into two periods pre-1905 and post-1905. The pre-1905 group were largely Northerners from established denominations. Their politics would probably be described today as left-leaning. They stressed education over legislation and viewed Prohibition as a way to help the poor. The WCTU came out of the early years. The Anti-Saloon League gradually took over the talking points and a guy named Wayne Wheeler is really who turned Prohibition into an Amendment. He was… shall we say strident in his beliefs. He’s an interesting fellow to read about, but he basically invented the idea of grassroots movements and popular mobilization efforts. Unfortunately, he was a little bit nuts. A good comparison might be if the Nazi party had decided it hated booze instead of Jews. He really turned the anti-alcohol movement from a liberal one to a more conservative one. Largely he did this because Prohibition’s roots were all in the north and midwest. It was basically staid, solid farm people and wealthy upper class women who saw alcohol as oppressing the people. Wheeler recognized that that constituency had taken the movement as far as it could take it and the place that was really holding up the anti-alcohol movement was the south. They basically didn’t give a rip. Alcohol had firm support throughout the south and Wheeler went about trying to change that. He did so largely by stoking immigrant fears (Yeah, we’ve had that playbook for awhile now.) He allied with groups like the KKK and other anti-immigrant groups throughout the south to advance a narrative that alcohol and immigrants went hand in hand. They began to see Prohibition as a victory of nativists. You see by WWI, that political cartoons show alcohol as being the nefarious servant of Germans to advance their will in the US. Here’s a particularly revealing cartoon from the period
Once Wheeler and the ASL had the south on board, it was only a matter of time. They had advanced the anti-immigrant agenda forever and by WWI, Germany with its reputation for brewing was seen as a pro-alcohol country and by standing up for Prohibition, you were actually standing up against Germany. Of course, what happened is that after the war the new allies in the south decided they liked alcohol after all as well as seeing how Prohibition was not hurting, but aiding organized crime that was largely immigrant in flavor and completely abandoned the movement. Anti-prohibitionists in the north were able to peel off many of the liberals particularly among women that were formerly in the WCTU when they invoked the idea that the crime that Prohibition brought brought more suffering than the alcohol.
I’ve heard the Roman Catholic Church described as a soft power continuation of the Roman Empire. Its state power crumbled with the fall of Rome but persisted and spread through religion for longer than the Roman Empire existed.
What if US white Evangelical Christianity is to the Old South as Roman Catholicism is to the Roman Empire?
I don’t really like this idea. Rome was pagan for ~1100 years, and Christian for ~40. The sudden change away from or hostility towards such ancient traditions was one more strain on a troubled empire and contributed to its collapse. Rome had plenty of other problems over its history, and part of the problem with Paganism was that people had no real enthusiasm for it even then, but the disruptive change in religion was just one more thing. Rome’s power was already failing, and years spent superstitiously tearing down buildings because the old gods had been revealed to have been demons the whole time, and the architecture was therefore possessed, only made her weaker. Rome could no longer defend herself against the Barbarians- who, by this time, were also Christians, and so by sacking Rome and initiating the Dark Ages, whose soft power was the Roman Catholic Church really exerting?
I don’t know. Anymore I don’t even think it is wrong for people with Southern roots to glorify their awful past, if we can avoid racism and at least be real about which side won and how history has proceeded since then. “Going back” isn’t really a thing, but if your great grandad marched with the Confederate Army and lived to tell about it, there should at least be ways that can be ok.
ISTM that people with Confederate roots tend to be more militaristic. They like guns, they have a thing for military history. Squash all of that and maybe you’re attacking a motive at large in the population for enlisting in the Army. I don’t mind Old South rootin’ gun nuts joining the Army- I don’t mind them doing a lot of things. It is mostly racism and misinformation that I’ll object to these days.