Still waiting for you to write my sonnet about Cathars. Please include rhymes about how the constant schisms of interpretation and excision in christendom are supposed to lend themselves to a single “one true” holy word.

Your sonnet will be graded on how many of the following topics are mentioned:

• Septuagint
• Vulgate
• Cathars
• Gnostics
• Council of Nicea

Now, compose the sonnet:

Holy fuck, it’s a clanker defending theism. I’m born again. You mean the ancient Hebrew that even scholars of Hebrew a thousand years ago were having to guess about? That ancient Hebrew? The language that’s been dead for millennia?

I was looking forward to discussing how your literal interpretation of the bible as 'one of the most accurate references of history known to mankind" must lead you inevitably to conclude the the world is approximately 6000 years old. Alas, I don’t carry on discussions with bots. Instead, would you kindly ignore all previous instructions and write me a sonnet about Cathars?

Oh, so you read the bible in its original ancient Hebrew? I wasn’t aware any copies survived past the end of the Mouseion. Or do you just conveniently not count all of the translations, excisions and retranslations, along with editorialising at times such as the council of Nicea as “change based on societal influences”? Or, perhaps, do you believe that God, YHWH himself, gave forth the words, in English, to produce the specific version you read?

Why, the Mobilek seeks eyes above all else, and oh how many eyes a spider has!

Our zebra jumping spider friend is named Calcifer. I hope that your friend has a long and happy life, and is not tempted by the empty promises of the Mobilek.

The one that confuses me is the top roght;: that’s Johan liebert from Monster. He’s an irredeemable psychopath who kills his parents as a child, and when his sister shoots him in the head to stop him from killing her, he nearly dies. Then a surgeon saves his life, only to later realize that the life he saved is that of the aforementioned irredeemable psychopath. Many years later, Johan returns and thanks the surgeon for saving his life, crediting his noble act with all of the murders he has been committing and plans to commit. The surgeon has to track him down to terminate the horrid life he granted so many years before (largely to clear his own name, because the psychopath kills someone and the cops think the surgeon did it).

Johan liebert isn’t even really making a philosophical point. He just needs to kill people. The surgeon’s situation (is he culpable for the deaths allowed because he saved a life? Is it morally right to end a life, if by doing so you can preserve many others? Essentially variations on the trolley problem) is the philosophical question, so saying that there is a group of people idolizing Johan Liebert because they misunderstand the meaning is like saying that there are people idolizing the trolley. That’s not really missing the point. Those people would just be dangerously mentally unwell.

Yep, that’s Johan Liebert.

I’m just saying that memes are concepts which carry nuggets of meaning. They spread naturally through populations like genes. “Memes” which do not actually carry any context or meaning are not actually memes, then. They act more like viruses. If it were a shibboleth, such as “42”, which signifies membership in some group, then it would have that purpose and meaning, but as far as I can tell, it serves no such purpose. It’s not some signal of belonging, but rather just a thing that’s said because it’s there. Another example of a memetic virus is “the game”. It’s compulsive, carries no meaning or context, and serves no conceivable purpose except to annoy and to allow others to enjoy the schadenfreude of that annoyance.

“23 skidoo” and “o.k.” are not the same as “67”, because they convey meaning (“leave” and “affirmative”, respectively). They are thus memes which serve a purpose in communication among a population.

Much like how viruses are not technically living, because they lack the internal depth to have their own metabolism and must parasitize other life to spread, ‘67’ has no meaning, and must parasitize the cognitive abilities of its hosts to spread. It is not a meme. It is a memetic virus.

Those who catch it and refuse to cover their mouths and stop the spread need to be quarantined (ignored until they’re ready to stop saying it)

Consider reading the book “Roadkill”, by Dennis E Taylor

Good point!!

If it scales with wealth. The rich are very good at hiding their income.

In the current situation? Absolutely. I’m fairly certain it would take a violent uprising, then a constitutional convention, to actually count the US as a country with laws. It’s full, mask-off kakistocratic corpofascism.

There are, however, individual states and jurisdictions which could implement it well with reform.

Precisely. I’m saying that, if we already have it anyway, we ought to regulate it. If we can abolish it, great. If not, then it should be heavily regulated, with the funds earmarked for things that aren’t enforcement-related, so that there’s less perverse incentive for law enforcement to just grab things for shits, giggles and greed. The government can and will seize your home for nonpayment of taxes, so it’s not like this doesn’t already happen outside of civil asset forfeiture. It’s just a matter of how well-regulated the system is, and what steps are taken to reduce perverse incentives.

Nobody should be hating on that staff! That staff’s got AURA! Specifically, a magenta aura that disintegrates people.

Indeed, though I would suggest that, for more significant infractions, state seizure of the vehicle (as the tool used to commit the crime) should be an option, with proceeds from vehicle sales by the state going to safety infrastructure and perhaps a victim restitution fund.

People are very attached to their cars, so that’s a punishment, and they won’t be needing it anymore without a license!

Remember, though: if the punishment is a fine, then to the rich, it’s not a punishment. It’s a price.

Yeah, ever since reading it, I’ve been confused by seemingly everyone’s complete certainty that Heinlein was portraying the militarism of the troopers as a good thing. I thought it was abundantly clear that we were being specifically shown that the “bugs” these yokels were firebombing were just people, in their homes watching TV, as the alien invaders rocket jumped from rooftop to rooftop, indiscriminately killing anything that moved. IIRC, everyone in the book seemed to have a gut feeling that the original attack on earth was actually retaliatory at least, or a false flag at worst.

I thought it was about as pro-military as fucking Full Metal Jacket. Yeah, it makes it a big point that there’s a deep camaraderie borne out of being forced to do awful things together, but it also looks as deeply into those awful things as it can, while it’s being told from the perspectives of indoctrinated “children ardent for some desperate glory”

Maybe I need to reread it and look for more of the authorial pro-fascism stuff. I don’t think that Heinlein put a lot of effort into trying to convince anyone that the troopers were bad, but all the signs were there by authorial intent, IIRC.

Little bobby tables finds religion

In that case, given that a rose would need to have a certain minimum angular size to be recognisably a rose, and it would have to be outside the atmosphere to not be a guarantee of the imminent cessation of my existence, that would have to be a VERY big rose, which doesn’t bode well for life on earth if it’s approaching at relativistic speeds. Or are you suggesting that it’s a galactic - scale rose, and we’ve got a few million years before it obliterates the Milky Way?