Basically yes? Antichrist is pluralized in the Bible in places and thus is not necessarily one individual. The false Prophets are described similarly.

Most of the pop culture picture of the Antichrist as a more singular entity is more like the Thessalonians “the man of sin”… Also known as the Man of Lawlessness, Apostasy, Insurrection, rebellion… One particularly agregious Antichrist that Jesus himself must come down and take out with a breath that exposes his naked wickedness to the worshipping masses who will realize that they are not among the saved. It’s sometimes interpreted that this kicks off the second coming but it doesn’t actually say that… It just says it happens sometime before the end of days which could mean it’s distinctly apart from and not feature of the revelation. Like some kind of Jesus warm up cameo.

Really its kind of tempting to paint Trump and Evengelicals in that role. He wouldn’t be the first nasty to wrap himself up in an altar cloth.

I wouldn’t say that’s the sentiment expressed when people remind others of the limitations of freedom of speech. More like it’s a reminder that knowing exactly where those boundaries lie because somethings aren’t the government’s job to mediate. Sometimes it’s our collective job to resist because nobody is coming to fix it for you.

Realistically rights like the freedom of speech and expression are notoriously weak by way of actual protection by a culture. Russia technically has freedom of speech on the books but you can still be hauled off to prison for spreading “LGBTQIA propaganda”. What actually protects those rights are the expectations and moreover the outrage of a culture’s people against these acts of censorship regardless of who is perpetuating it.

Wouldn’t that be if they were connected at the tail? This is more of a disorganised avian garroting caused by a constant futile bid for meaningful independence.

I think of America more as a swarm of 50 plus angry pigeons tied together at the neck with string.

I am in the process of a long term tea vs coffee war with my partner. I love both but tea is easier on me. Both are rabbitholes and because they are cultural standbys a lot of people grew up with one or the other and like it more because of personal familiarity than actually forming a detached opinion.

A lot of friends over the years who “didn’t like coffee” simply formed the opinion because people who didn’t really know coffee gave them stuff that was kind of shit. Giving them something on the upper end of the spectrum or is just very different from their expectation can change people into full on coffee drinkers. It’s more common in coffee because a lot of people actually don’t like dark roasts or are sensitive to stale oxidized tastes.

Tea is generally harder to convert people to with as much enthusiasm because individual blends vary so widely that it can be hit or miss for individual tastes. You need to try people on like several blends over multiple days to find out their profile.

I mean… It’s grocery store tea. Same thing as grocery store coffee. It’s in the mediocre range. To convert a non-tea person you need more than just giving them “okay”. If you give someone who doesn’t know tea a mediocre tea and tell them it’s “good tea” you basically just increase the evidence that tea isn’t all that and they don’t see much benefit in seeking it out the same way they would if you go out of your way to blow their mind.

The reason Yorkshire Gold doesn’t trip your sensitivity is because they roast it longer. It kind of destroys the individual character and flavor profile of the different tea varieties but it means that it becomes nigh impossible to oversteep.

How on earth did you interpret I was suggesting you place that kind of burden on a beginner - are you mental?

No! You, the converter make tea for the convertee so all they need to do is put fabulous tea in their face and benefit from your experience… Or just go to a good restaurant and have actually great tea. Point being is if you want someone to potentially like tea the burden of proof that tea is awesome is on you to prove.

Some might be swayed by giving them stale preportioned box tea that is formulated not to be awesome - just harder than average to fuck up with a long steep time because it’s overroasted… But good luck.

I have converted non-coffee /tea people and it’s not like they’ve never had tea before. Some people legit don’t like it but more or have been trained to ambivalence because people have given them a lot of mediocre tea and sold them the idea that the mediocre was good. For those people it takes way more than another banal so/so experience solidifing their notion that tea kind of is just “okay” to actually get them curious.

Yeah, but if you are trying to actually impress someone it’s not where you start. I buy Yorkshire when I am hard up for cash because I am already addicted to black tea and it’s ridiculously cheap but in the realm of tea in general it’s equivalent to the same supermarket coffees.

If you actually want to hook someone you give them the good stuff first to show them the experience to aspire. If it’s coffee go to a roaster, buy whole bean, grind it yourself before brew and use good technique in prep or go to a shop that knows their shit to do it all for you. If it’s tea go and spring for a loose leaf properly sealed, pay attention to steep time and ideal water temp. You want to see their eyes shine when they take their first sip with the realization of a new word opening up.

Give it like a few years and they’ll drink Yorkshire of their own volition. If you didn’t grow up with tea as a nostalgia you got to traverse a barrier and create a memory they want to relive in another way.

I am sorry… They gave you Yorkshire tea and expected you to be impressed? Please tell me you are joking.

In Canadian equivalent it’s like trying to take a foreigner to Tim Hortons. Just because it’s the historical cheap swill choice of the masses one participates in out of habit doesn’t mean it is objectively good.

Well… A lot of their biblical evidence is less a rewrite and more of a translation issue. Take the whole Sodom and Gehmorra story about tje two angels that everyone is so keen to turn into a condemnation of the gays.

In the OG text the words used to describe the angels were analog to genderless forms of the word “master” and because there were two of them they were always referred to by genderless they/them plural… Which is probably why there were two of them. We are probably supposed to imply the perceived gender of the angels was irrelevant to the tale.

The first Latin and English translations off of Hebrew however used gendered terms for the two angels that coded them as male. Stuff like “Masters” “Lords” that kind of thing in large part because those societies were respectively fairly misogynistic and not primed to interpret either of the two genderless entities as possibility female coded. Then you see the anti same sex interpretation gain popularity in the case of England and France at the time they were going through a population crash via plague which caused amoung other things criminalization of same sex unions as a threat to sexual replacement of a sharply diminished population. So really we can trace this story being interpreted as God’s condemnation of the gays rather then just regular old rapists around the same time the word “sodomy” came into the lexicon in the 1300’s and the first waves of plague.

I really want to watch Harris take this chicken apart bone by bone in debate like a mechanical separator. The world demands this man be turned into Trump McNuggets on live tv.

“Being Hot” is never someone’s entire personality. Most of the time it’s just the veneer used to keep people at a distance. There are advantages to not being hot - mainly you are not hassled by people for attention. Getting approached by people who want something from you all the time tends to make one put up walls. It’s easier to be kind when so little is generally expected of you because it’s not being demanded regularly.

Not everyone has the strength to be as nice and polite to the 50th person trying to score their number that week as they are to the first. We as a society spend way too much time dehumanizing people because of this shit. I am not conventionally attractive and I bless my lucky stars that I grew up never being denied affection by family or friends because I wasn’t good looking. I see people at my job talk about the pretty actor folk behind their backs and it sounds just as catty and insecure as the shit people said about me for being unattractive.

I fucking hate thos saying. The moralizing of vanity is just another way to feel superior. The people who put a lot of work into how they look do so for a multitude of reasons. Sometimes it’s because they are just having fun but other times it’s because they grow up being told that they are never enough. That they are simply being deficient for not trying hard enough in which case their lack of vanity becomes instead the moral failure of gluttony or sloth. There is no win state. So then you are simply reinforcing that who they are aside from their appearance is worthless because they are empty voids for caring about the one thing that might be a rare source of validation. We all experience the effects of the privilege of attractiveness or it’s lack. A lot of us spend lifetimes unpacking the toxic effects of that programming. This isn’t the way to go about stopping that cycle.

“Vanity makes a person ugly inside” is just another way to put someone down so the person wielding this cliche can feel big. It’s moralizing someone’s relationship to their physicality and preying on places where people are trained to be weak.

Do they just figure the brainwashing has stuck by now? Is that it?

Like if they draw a connection between whatever weird thing they can possibly shoestring to trans women all of the conditioning will kick in and they will go "Brrr Trans woman BAD, me no trans! Me hate bad thing that will make me trans! "

It’s funny being neurodivergant and dealing with neurotypicals who really don’t get it and then finding someone who is your exact brand of neurospicy and then watching them sit back in confusion as all of a sudden they are the odd one out.

“How about we verbalize our intentions?” “Pppft! You’re the only one here who needs verbal cues. Try reading body language and not just assuming anything SUSAN.”

Yeah I got a older co worker who behaves in a way that strikes me as very undiagnosed autistic of his generation. He went on a whole rant about how the Olympics should be like a family reunion where you have to mask your less socially acceptable behaviours and cannot just be yourself because you shouldn’t always be yourself around your family for the sake of overall unity…

And yeah… I was just thinking how sad that was. Like bro. We’ve since realized how toxic that is to people and our generation is trying to undo that expectation and damage. The neurotypical flattening of self expression always was a tyranny, you just normalized it.

I propose a new social convention where anyone who starts talking about people of any kind in terms of being breeding stock is declared free game to be immediately socked in the gonads by any and all listeners present.

Under this subheading are topics Up to and including :

• Racist narratives about racial replacement or “breeding groups out of existence”

• Facist and Misogynistic theory about the redistribution of resources ie : women

• Transphobic conspiracies about how they are really trying to sterilize swacks of the population through hysterectomies

• Homophobic narratives about how same sex relationships are not “fruitful” and thus worthless

• Idiot relatives who are so desperate to get you to mash your genitals with someone else’s so they can babysit as a hobby that they will drive you to murder if not stopped.

Not unity specifically. Excellence, Respect and Friendship without discrimination. Technically “unity” is not a core mission statement and what is considered culturally significant is left to the host country to decide.

Is a fashion show featuring people dressed to reference Greek Gods off brand for the French?Not really. Historically speaking the Nobility used to employ people to dress up to become Greek gods in tableau to serve as living lawn ornements.

The original Olympics, both the ancient practice and the og international competition used to also feature arts and culture. Since the painting they were referencing was not the Last Supper and about Greek Gods it wasn’t an intended act of disrespect or division … But other forces are definitely choosing to make it so based on the idea that these things should be of the broadest possible appeal.

I would imagine if it was a bunch of straight people in silly costumes we would be having a very different conversation… Maybe about how art was once part of the Olympics. That would be a fun thing to talk about.

“How dare the queers…” is so tiring a conversation to keep having over and over.

I would argue once the guillotine becomes a factor we don’t become equal… Some of us come up short.

I will see myself out.