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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • The Egyptians have Ramses

    Uh? Ramesses was human - all 11 of them were. Egypt has the likes of Ra, Osiris, Anubis and so on, who I don’t think are particularly tyranical in their stories.

    For China, the actual mythology stuff is a lot of creation myth, but they do have a few stories about a divine emperor crushing an army of demons, and it turns out a lot of that is actually about conquering less developed, more nomadic cultures to unify China (Japan pretty much did the same, creation myth then crushing foreign demons that are actually literally foreigners not under their rule). And then there’s the whole mandate of Heaven that they used to justify dynasties rising and falling, mixing up history into myth, that began when a government that started well ended up being seen as tyranical after a few centuries (the Shang, ending with Zhou and Daji).

    Older, more primordial mythologies just start at world creation myth, and then talk about humans figuring out how to settle the land, and how the universe works. Mesopotamian cultures mostly focus on defeating the forces of nature, which does involve standing up to violent gods or monsters, but that comes from trying to build up a civilization that can survive disasters, and is actually not tied to tyranical human rulers. Any civilization needs to start with things like water control, that’s why everyone from China to Greece also have that. Sumerians specifically have cities that go to war with each other because “the chief god of their city told them to”, which is obviously manipulation to secure resources, but isn’t particularly tyranical against their own people. And then the Bronze Age Collapse happens, after which the myth of Ishbi and Erra shows a war god who gets petty and kills everyone because people didn’t pay attention to him. So again, the stories of tyranical gods come from people trying to survive and explain destruction events, from nature or from outside forces. When the Assyrians go around killing everyone, Sennacherib destroys Babylon out of anger and frustration - he tries to write a story about the god of Babylon ordering him to do that, and another story of his own god putting the same god of Babylon on trial for some crime, but that doesn’t stick and Sennacherib gets murdered.

    At some point it’s not easy to distinguish mythology and simply literature. For China specifically, Journey to the West and Investiture of the Gods talk a lot about the bureaucracy and hierarchy of the Heavens, the oppression of gods and demons - but they’re 16th century novels, are they really mythology? Those stories clearly became popular because people felt oppressed by tyrants, so the myths about tyranical gods can of course be a reaction to the people experiencing tyranical rule. Sun Wukong’s story famously starts because the various systems of the Heavens can’t contain him (and mankind), only Buddha can - but then that’s still a 16 c. novel that showed up long after the creation of Buddhist “mythology”, its spiritual structure and divine figures.

    So there’s multiple reasons for stories to pop up about gods becoming tyrants, either because the people get upset at actual tyrant kings, or because one country tries to justify the destruction of another country. But there’s a distinction to be made about stories written as piece of literature and when they become actual civilization building myths that is a fundamental part of its culture. The older a civilization develops and gets centralized, the more opportunities you get for anyone to write more stories that become myth a few hundred years later. If that civilization has ups and downs, the stories about gods are more likely to reflect that. (I think Egypt got out of that because it actually collapsed 3 times, and kept starting over with new gods doing the same things, none of the unified kingdoms lasted more that 500 years)




  • Does the article say the headline is wrong? Or does it say conspiracy theorists listen to facts because it relies on a handful of willing participants who changed their mind when seeing facts and reports? Because that’s not the crux of the crazy conspiracy theorists.

    Try again when the chatbot talked to the likes of Graham Hancock or the hardcore MAGA death cult. Facts don’t matter.

    Rand pointed out that many conspiracy theorists actually want to talk about their beliefs. “The problem is that other people don’t want to talk to them about it,”

    Just look at this guy who straight up pretends that no one tried to talk to them before.

    It does talk about gish gallop at the very end, and claims that the chatbot can keep presenting arguments - but doesn’t actually say that it has worked.



  • Everyone getting the same chance means 50/50 hiring because believe it or not, women do want to work in all fieds; the current 70/30 soon goes down to 50/50 from there. And yes, men do want to work in healthcare and child care and education, surprise. Why do you need to make sure they can’t? Because that is in fact the same process that happens, one side is actively shunned from some jobs and the other side gets shunned all the same, even though there are people on both sides who do want to work in both types of jobs. The reality that you pretend doesn’t exist is that there are 10 women who want to be an engineer at the beginning of their education and they get stomped down to 1 until she gets passed over for some 10 men who at first wanted to work in healthcare but were bullied into engineering. This 1 woman to 10 men scenario is your own creation.

    It takes actual work of being unfair to maintain the imbalance you benefit from. Man you don’t even understand the math of your own argument, maybe the women who get hired over you actually are more skilled.


  • It should be 7 men 3 women, on average

    No, it should not. That’s just ridiculous. You don’t fix unequality by maintaining it just because that’s what you’re always known. You want to keep the privileges you have now while denying improving the situation of others, because you think losing your unfair advantage over others becomes unfair to you, that’s nonsense.

    Hiring 50/50 is not discriminating against you just because you were at 70 before. You don’t get to decide that half the female population of the planet shouldn’t be allowed to work - because that’s what your 70/30 is, if the 70 is most of the male population (let’s imagine a >90% employment rate), then the 30 is around half of the female population, you’re saying the other half will never be allowed to work. You’re assuming they can keep being SAHM or whatever else.

    The thing is that the 70% of workers being men shouldn’t mean there are less men if it becomes 50%. Men aren’t losing their jobs. It means there are more workers, including the same number of men, and more women. This isn’t supposed to be a zero sum game when population grows.


  • Oops, sorry for the confusion.

    But now you’ve also influxed a tonne of women into that workforce, meaning now you’ll need to hire disproportionately more men next generation.

    Even though we reached equal representation? You want to reinject more of one side to recreate the imbalance we were getting away from a minute ago? The only gap is between generations, when the old people retire, at first that’ll be a lot of men since they’re the only ones that were there, but it shouldn’t be that hard to map that out to maintain equality through the change. Plus, hiring seniors is a thing, so hiring older women and not all young women can immediately balance that retirement sausage fest faster, removing the gender imbalance per generation. You’re supposed to hire at all levels, entry level only is just more corporate speak. And that’s not just about women or minorities, that’s already a subject for people who can’t get a job because companies want both experience and entry level pay, this isn’t new, it already hits everyone, including poor white men. Fixing this helps everyone.

    Also, I mentioned it before, but I’m not talking about a single company on a single job position. As long as everyone plays the game, and not everyone has the same amount of people on the same generation and retiring at the same time, it shouldn’t be that hard to smooth out the curb to the middle, and then stay there. All HR departments in the world should know how to plan that, they’re built around their love of Excel sheets.

    Hiring 50/50 is of course part of it, yes, it’s not like the whole world is really doing 100% women only everywhere, you know that’s just not reality. If one company is doing “men need not apply”, you know there are other companies that aren’t. Of course that depends on the job, because places that say “this job is only good for women” (like, you know, low-level healthcare), or the other way around (mechanics? That’s only for men!), has been an issue long before people started complaining about diversity hire, they just didn’t like to mention it because they liked it. Hiring exclusively women was fine when it was for low level jobs that men obviously don’t want to do - except there’s plenty of men who do want to work in healthcare or childcare or education, and they can’t.

    Encouraging young men and women to branch out more is of course a good idea, but we’ve seen for decades that women who want to try STEM and the likes often ended up chased away by men who say “it’s no place for women” (students, senior employees, teachers) and because the culture is already plagued by sexism and racism and exclusion and actual threats. Starting at the bottom and doing nothing else doesn’t actually work, we’ve tried that and it failed hard and we’ve all gone surprised pikachu face about it. The fact is that young women do want to try STEM, until they get assaulted and victimized, just like there are young men who do want to try traditionally female jobs, until they get mocked and harassed for not being manly enough. These people already exist, we’re already telling them to try it out - only to destroy them within a couple years. We do have to include the middle and the top right from the start, it has to happen everywhere, and people who fight back have to be forced to accept it - we have to clean up the “locker room” culture and the “traditional gender role” culture to protect the people that want to join these places.


  • You complained that hiring was focusing on women and men didn’t need to apply and that’s not equality. I discussed why diversity is important to lift up people in need and why that is, in fact, equality. You’re the one who keeps focusing on poor white men, pretending that I’m ignoring them, why are you pretending they don’t benefit from equality and improving housing, education, childcare? Equality helps everyone.

    hire minorities at a much greater proportion than how they’re represented in the population

    Oh okay you’re just straight up lying then lmao. To those used to privilege, equality feels like oppression. Did you know that about half of humanity is female? You know half the people in high places aren’t female. Or even in medium places. And let’s not even talk about all the other minorities.

    Wherever you are, see if you can find some unemployment or income numbers for your area, if it’s broken down by gender or ethnicity. It might surprise you!


  • So you’re saying to start a new system where you only hire non white/ non males.

    I say balance and that’s your take?

    poor white people who never had any opportunities and currently don’t but, fuck them right, they are white.

    Man. I spoke about hiring based on skills the whole time. This imbalance in poor, less skilled white men was already there before you started talking about diversity hire, but you chose to blame diversity hire, because you think unskilled women or minorities get hired over skilled but poor white men. I spoke about improving housing, education, childcare, and all other basic needs, I didn’t say that only applies if you’re not a white man. It goes for everyone. But those poor white men aren’t getting help from the current situation either way, and you seem to think that the only solution is to hire them over minorities. You’re not talking about helping all the people in this situation, you just want the poor white men to get hired and not get passed over for less skilled women - you’re fine with leaving everyone else behind. You’re not even considering that everyone might deserve a spot somewhere, you think there’s only one spot and it should go to the skilled white man.


  • Minorities get passed over and screwed over for basic needs like housing, education, childcare, etc. As a result, when someone says “we only hire competent people, the best people for the job, it’s not our fault if these minorities we interviewed happen to be incompetent” that’s already setting things up to reduce their presence in society, which loops into making them poorer, with less access to basic needs and so on. Refusing to hire a woman for one job and hiring a man instead because you think she’s less competent is tunnel vision, you’re focusing on a single job and trying to scale that to the whole of society; the most direct answer is just to hire more people and train everyone. It’s corporate thinking to assume you will only hire a single perfect worker for all of your jobs, but all you’re doing is only reducing your work force, which only ever works for the corporate bottom line until you run out of people to fire. And when the imbalance is so bad, there is a point where, on a large sale, you need to hire a higher number of women / Black people / handicapped people to catch up, because you’ve shut them down the whole time; and that basically makes it your own fault if you think they’re less competent than educated competent men, because they didn’t get the opportunity, because they didn’t get the training, because… they didn’t get the opportunity.

    The “hire only competent people = only white men” is a self-fulfilling prophecy because it creates the entire situation of everyone else being less competent, being lower on the decision totem pole (like the decision to help minorities get out of that loop), having lower incomes. If you help only your own because they have the skills you want, you are creating the situation where you perceive everyone else to be lower by your own standards. Someone’s gotta make the first step to bring everyone up to the same level, and you know it’s not going to start in education and housing. Because those people are not up there making the decision to help with that. The people who can make the decision choose not to help, because those minorities don’t have the same skills as this other guy here.


  • The “gospels were dictated by first hand witness” idea is a massive problem because that’s not first hand account at all, that’s actually someone claiming that someone else told him “dude I swear I saw it happen in front of me as clear as I see you” (or worse, the guy who wrote it claims that he found this text written by someone else 50 years ago) and we somehow chose to believe both the guy who wrote it and the supposed guy who told him that. Having something dictated is second hand account, not first hand, because that’s just changing the pronoun of the person speaking. And there were extensive analysis of the text itself to try to figure out what kind of person would have phrased this or that in certain ways, whether it says “I saw that myself” or “my uncle who works at Nintendo told me he saw it himself”, and that analysis, done for the entirety of the Bible, has gone pretty far, including the gospels. As far as I know about it, the biggest point about that analysis is which gospel was written first and which ones copied from which ones or added their own thing, rahter than 4 different people recounting their memories of the same events.

    I don’t know about the timeline of the temple; I’ve heard it brought up before, but I haven’t heard that it was considered conclusive evidence for dating the text, so I don’t know more than that and how it holds to the text analysis.