Zoe Chase did a great background on Newt. It's from some years ago and she notes how he generated animosity on a national scale and leveraged it raise Republican voting numbers.
It's quite good. Zoe is really interested in this stuff. The reporting isn't confrontational, it's just how things unrolled.
How is it possible to not be familiar with this common criticism? e.g., Leviticus prohibits wearing clothes woven of two different types of fabric and calls for killing adulterers, anyone who curses their parents, etc. etc. which millions of cherry pickers ignore while constantly referring to the bit about laying with a man as with a woman.
I think it's extremely possible to be familiar with the criticism without ever having seen specific examples. I certainly haven't. I guess I assumed it was something to do with people misunderstanding the difference between new and old testament, or something to that effect.
Your comment also does not seem to present any examples of this. You start talking about it, but then you move on to complaining about cherry-pickers instead of showing some other part of the old testament which happens to encourage wearing clothes woven of two different types or not killing adulterers or something.
> Probably to show you can pick any choose any bible verse to make whatever point you want.
Explicit contradictions aren't the only basis for that, but for those, bible-defending pedants can see password4321's comment that started this subthread as well as his followup.
Then say the argument for what it is - “the text is often misunderstood and/or misrepresented”, not “the text itself is somehow hypocritical because people misuse it”.
I don’t even disagree with you, I just don’t get why you’re so purposely mislabeling it.
> not “the text itself is somehow hypocritical because people misuse it”.
I should stick with not responding, but I never said anything of the sort. And despite my many criticisms of religion and the religious, I have never in my life had the thought that the BIBLE is "hypocritical", just because it has inconsistencies and contradictions (which it genuinely does AS DOCUMENTED here, NOT merely people hypocritically misusing, misinterpreting, or cherry picking from it) -- ascribing hypocrisy to the bible is a category mistake.
> you’re so purposely mislabeling it.
So not only am I mislabeling something that I never labeled, I'm doing so purposely? And not just purposely, but purposely in extremis?
What an absurd and disgusting uncharitable personal attack. I will truly never respond to you again.
But they weren't touting the bible or offering it as an authority, just saying that one particular statement was "aspirational" but has practical problems ("To isolate children from the iniquity of the parent would require the dissolution of the family").
Of course one can quote the statement that one agrees with and not the statement one doesn't agree with, unless the intent is to review the work that contains them, which it wasn't.
Quoting one statement from a source in support of one's perspective can be interpreted as an attempt to demonstrate that the source aligns with that perspective.
"can" != "necessarily does", but you said "can't", which is what I refuted. And I think your assertion here is even more baseless, frankly ... there's zero indication that they offered the quote to buff the bible, which was not previously the subject of discussion. And they didn't even quote it in support of their perspective, they said it was "aspirational" but then said "To isolate children from the iniquity of the parent would require the dissolution of the family".
I also pushed back at the bible thumpers who demanded contradictions in the bible from me when the whole context was you explicitly pointing one out.
I have far better things to do than discuss the absurdities of texts written by ignorant nomads and Roman propagandists thousands of years ago (and spun by agents of King James) so I won't respond further ... over and out.
Your citation refers to the register keyword and trigraphs, among other language features -- the author seems to have forgotten his own point, among a number of other inconsistencies and contradictions, and at times seems to go out of his way to come across as a jerk, e.g., "This is what fifteen years of standards work on an eight-letter keyword looks like".
People love to rag on the standards committee. I was on X3J11, the C Language Standards Committee, in 1989 ... in fact, due to alphabetical order I was the first person on the planet to vote to approve the C language standard -- the one that first standardized register and trigraphs. Standards work is hard and everyone hates you for it.
Indeed. Aside from being extraordinarily intellectually lazy, bothsidesing actually enables corruption by failing to identify it, or failing to distinguish degrees of corruption that are so severe as to be more differences in kind than differences in degree. And thus in the U.S. we get Trump and his entire cabinet, Clarence Thomas and the rest of the Federalist Society, the Kochs, money pouring into elections via Citizens United courtesy of John Roberts, and much of the rest of the GOP political apparatus ... in large part a result of people staying home or voting 3rd party because their "principles" didn't let them vote for "the lesser of two evils".
It's not intellectually lazy, it's being intellectually tired.
Both parties only every get anything done in this country when it comes to voting to restrict our rights. Ideologically, I'm slightly right leaning. My primary value is individual rights are more important. But if I could, I would vote for Ron Wyden(D) despite the fact that I disagree with many of his positions, he's still one of the few that has a spine to oppose things like the federal spying apparatus.
I just don't see the point of investing myself in caring when 98 percent of our reps just really don't care and only focus on manufacturing outrage around wedge issues that they can't or won't actually address so that they can keep their jobs and continue to accrue massive amounts of wealth from lobbying and insider trading. We get Trump because the system is so thoroughly broken on both sides and enough people are frustrated the point that they are "protest" voting.
I can understand it's tiring. But, as someone who was born in totalitarian regime - you still have plenty opportunities to change things in the U.S. Many U.S. states have direct democracy, which is unique in vast majority of the world. You still have free media. You can influence primaries of the two parties.
I don't think people are "protest" voting. You're the one protest voting - by not voting at all. You should ask yourself, why they bother, when you do not.
The system does not allow good candidates to make it through to a vote. (When it does, they are quickly either ejected or “brought in” to the system.)
There are other, more effective ways to vote than at the ballot box. Money, time, voice (depending on your reach), protest, direct action can all have a greater impact.
IMHO building parallel systems is the most important thing right now, as the primary political system is entering a period of crisis that it may not survive. Parallel systems, especially strong local systems, have a long and successful history.
> The system does not allow good candidates to make it through to a vote.
This simply isn't true. What is true is that there's a strong bias which makes it harder, but hyperbole is a form of lying.
> There are other, more effective ways to vote than at the ballot box. Money, time, voice (depending on your reach), protest, direct action can all have a greater impact.
False dichotomy/strawman ... no one said there aren't ... and many of these ways affect who wins elections.
Perhaps that's in part a cause of the former in your case ... but you aren't everyone and I was referring to bothsidesing generally.
> I just don't see the point of investing myself in caring when 98 percent of our reps just really don't care and only focus on manufacturing outrage around wedge issues that they can't or won't actually address so that they can keep their jobs and continue to accrue massive amounts of wealth from lobbying and insider trading.
More intellectual laziness, as well as intellectual dishonesty, offering ignorant simplistic but oh so handy explanations and excuses.
> We get Trump because the system is so thoroughly broken on both sides and enough people are frustrated the point that they are "protest" voting.
This is another fine example of such intellectual laziness. People who actually put in the effort to understand politics know how simplistic this is.
Since you're so tired and don't care, I won't respond further.
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