Just_A_Guy

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Everything posted by Just_A_Guy

  1. I was privileged (ulp! There’s that word again) to have a 10th grade English teacher who insisted on giving us weekly vocabulary lists (and, thereafter, tests) of really obscure words. That was one of them.
  2. And for the sake of context, I believe the "basic claim" here is that Uchtdorf is "privileged"--notwithstanding his having grown up in Hitler's Germany with a father who was a non-Nazi bureaucrat, being evicted from Czechoslovakia into eastern Germany, starving in postwar Germany with the rest of his countrymen, living under occupation by Soviet troops, then ultimately having to flee east Germany because his dad was an anti-communist. But we know that Uchtdorf made it into the (barely-one-year-old at the time) German Air Force, which (we are to conclude) means: He was privileged (because if you didn't have connections you couldn't make it *anywhere* in mid-20th-century Germany) (except the chancellery, multiple times); His rise from destitution to prosperity had nothing--nothing!--to do with his own efforts, qualities, or anything else that might support the idea of meritocracy (because as we all know, German culture absolutely values caste, charisma, and the ability to schmooze at the expense of competence, efficiency, and skill); and Most germane to this discussion: White™ Dieter simply has no idea how hard or cruel life can be; and his apostleship would have been better conferred upon some hirsute womanizing tent-dweller in Portland or some "From The River To The Sea!"-gibbering student in London; either of whom would have had the wisdom and passion to funnel the Church's vast resources towards the cronies causes that rightfully deserve them.
  3. It’s a start. A pet peeve of mine I’ve had in these sorts of discussions in various fora is that people will express concern about a professor who did this or said that, and I (who have a daughter who hopes to start at BYU next fall) will be like “oh, can you tell me who said that so we can know to avoid their classes”, and suddenly people are bashful and worried about being accused of doxxing. I mean, I get that no one wants to be responsible for creating a mob. But if we aren’t going to identify the bad’uns, what’s the point of complaining about them?
  4. Ruby Franke pled out today. The plea statement included additional details that are not for the faint-of-heart.
  5. I really wish someone would set up a website naming the specific professors who are spouting this sort of stuff.
  6. Like some others have expressed: life is short, and this essay is very long indeed. The few paragraphs I skimmed were long on drama queenery and look-at-me-ism, and (for something purportedly written by a currently-serving missionary) short on Christ-Jesus-and-Him-crucified. I’ve seen no indication that the quality of the rest of the essay, the ideas contained therein, or the author himself merit much more time or attention.
  7. Holy understatement, Batman! Ethnic German family that had been in Czechoslovakia for some time, kicked out after WW2, then had to flee eastern Germany because his dad opposed Stalin— (oh—wait—maybe THAT’s why the proggies have soured on Uchtdorf!) . . . Given that West Germany’s second chancellor was the son of a shopkeeper and its third chancellor was the son of a factory clerk (not to mention the failed artist son of an illegitimate customs clerk who had been running the show in Germany a few years before), I’m going to assert with some level of confidence that mid-20th century German society wasn’t quite as rigid as you seem to suggest here. It seems that we have no grounds for asserting that Uchtdorf’s “privilege” amounted to anything more than being middle class and ethnically German in a country that even today is 88% ethnically German.
  8. You’re right about definitions varying. Race, in Brazil, is tied just as much to economic status as to actual skin tone. You can take two people of identical skin appearance, and based on dress and grooming and deportment and accent and other cues about wealth/stability, one will be dubbed “preto” (“dark”) and the other won’t. That’s another reason this whole business of whining about the race of the various members of the Q12 is so silly—progressive members are, ironically, imposing an American notion of what globalism is supposed to look like.
  9. 1. Erm . . . Uchtdorf’s family was refugees because their ethnicity in their particular area was on the losing side of World War II. Gong’s dad, I understand, was a professor at San Jose State (a minor school . . my mom went there) —secure, but likely not particularly wealthy. And Gong was working at the US embassy in Beijing when Tiananmen Square happened, so . . . there’s that . . . But perhaps the complaint about Gong’s “white upper middle class values” is the really revealing part here. Maybe we don’t actually care what color the apostles’ skins are, or how poor they are/used to be, or even what country they’re from; but we care very much about their being hostile to the cultural mores to which we are hostile and to which we think any God worthy of our worship must be similarly hostile. Is the problem really that apostles like Uchtdorf, Nelson, Oaks, and Soares were ostensibly born with some imagined degree of privilege? Or is it that their life stories hew uncomfortably close to a Horatio Alger novel; and we recoil at the notion of that being seen as a model for Saints in the third world, because we’ve committed ourselves to an economic/ political philosophy that denies such rags-to-riches stories based in WASP-y notions of hard work and education and creativity and self-sacrifice and family and faith and friendship and individual virtue are even possible? 2. This probably isn’t what you want to hear, but . . . BYU (and the other CES schools, and perhaps increasingly the PEF as well) are that leadership training program. My first mission president was Carlos Godoy—grew up lower-middle class in southern Brazil, converted to the Church as a teenager, went to college, married young, Master’s degree at BYU, management track at a series of multinational corporations, hiatus as a mission president while still in his 30s, corporate consulting work, and then the Q70 and now the presidency of the 70. But with regard to Church leadership specifically: I think one of the strengths of the Church is that theres no “leadership track” that individual members can pursue with the likely end of a role in the global church hierarchy. Keeps the riffraff out. I daresay that a number of secularist/ partisan think tanks have spent a lot of frustrating hours trying to figure out how they might infiltrate the LDS Q70/Q12 the way they’ve infiltrated the leadership of so many other modern institutions; to remarkably little avail.
  10. Lemme get this straight: —Two of the last three apostles are men of color; one of whom is in an interracial marriage (which I’ll bet has never created any difficulties for him) and the other of whom is from Latin America (but is still privileged because he chose to take a clerical job as a teenager and went on to get an accounting degree). —But: we’re concerned because the third apostle is —an Englishman —who was born on the Scottish border —and spent much of his youth in Saudi Arabia —(where his dad was apparently a weapons contractor), —and spent much of his Church ministry advocating for refugees— And thus, is ill-suited to properly comprehend the problems posed by ethnic tensions and/or poverty? And we’re also going to keep kvetching that the recently-called apostles are, on the whole, “too white”?
  11. Perhaps. It’s a really hard thing to come up with something that is original, entertaining, has a solid story, has good underlying values, is executed well, and is “clean”. I think that’s why Pixar—up until the last 10 years or so—was such a unicorn. I think your point about “the right can’t win” probably has some merit—not because conservatives are inherently “nattering nabobs of negativity”; but because a) “family values” types who are offended enough by crudity to vote with their wallets are probably a distinct minority generally; and b) the modern American political right is by its nature a fractious bunch—an uncomfortable alliance between values/social/religious conservatives with rigid moral codes, and business-types and secular libertarians who might value “law and order” but have little use for stringent personal ethics (especially self-discipline or sexual probity) so long as stores aren’t being robbed and contracts are being honored.
  12. I’m probably just showing my age here, but . . . While I agree with the political point that I’m sure the producers are making, the trailer seemed to have a lot of crudity and double-entendres that don’t really impress me in the media I consume. I’m not sure that aiding and abetting—or even just accepting and reflecting—the general coarsening of society, is really helpful in the broader goal of protecting innocence and virtue.
  13. The men’s beards were nuthin’. You should have seen the women’s beards.
  14. In a non-nationalized election regimen (ie, individual states set up their own procedures) there’s always going to be some tomfoolery somewhere, which in our day and age will provide useful video clips that will tend to affirm someone’s desire to believe that the whole shebang was rigged. I haven’t done an exhaustive study of all the alleged 2020 fraud. I did look at 2 or 3 of the allegedly most obvious cases (as alleged by Trump, Powell, & Co) and remember coming away with the impression that the claims being made about them were overblown. I recognize the leftist march through our institutions (including the judiciary) over the past decades, but have not seen a 2020 election case where it seemed clear that the court reached the wrong result. (I agree that the current criminal charges, by contrast, are as dodgy as heck; there were probably some technical violations—with RICO, pretty much ANYTHING is a technical violation—but I think the real crime being charged is effectually “Presidenting While Republican”.) This is an over-simplification, but . . . Trump was consistently trailing in the 2020 polls. We all knew it. We all consoled ourselves with the idea that the polling was off; that a red wave would materialize on Election Day in just the right combination of states so as to give Republicans a victory in the electoral college. That wave *sort of* materialized—the final RCP poll average (https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/2020/national/) had the popular vote at 51.8% Biden versus 43.4% Trump; and when all the votes were counted nationwide it was actually 51.3%/46.8%. But the simple fact is that all along, the GOP’s only hope of victory was a series of coordinated lightning strikes in just the right places; and that simply didn’t happen. At the end of the day: as a party, we nominated a bad guy; and everyone knew he was a bad guy; and most of the self-proclaimed moral consciences of the nation on the Christian Right were openly reveling in the fact that they had a bad guy who would fight their battles for them—and the country had just plain had enough of it all.
  15. That kid represents himself and the Church really, really well.
  16. I saw about a 10 minute clip of Candace being interviewed by Tucker Carlson, and the issue came up. I thought she came across as being very measured and gracious. I think they’re both right, to a certain extent—there *should* be ongoing dialogue (especially with regard to just how deeply the US should get involved), as Candace says: and a call for permanent ceasefire at this point in time is essentially a call for unfettered Jew-killing, as Ben says.
  17. Indeed. And at a time when we are still dickering over getting the Dubai temple built, and looking towards keeping good relations with the Arab partners of the BYU Jerusalem center, it’s conceivable that the Lord doesn’t feel the costs are worth the benefits for the Church to come out as stridently pro-Israel.
  18. “Tell us you support Israel without dealing with the political fallout of telling us you support Israel.” Well-played, President. Very well-played, indeed.
  19. What I was trying to flat-out imply was that no, there’s no way that even more pragmatic/politically savvy libertarians or corporate conservatives would try to muzzle the moralistic ideologues who (I would like to think!) would be leading the opposition in such a scenario. As for the history: seriously, watch The Scarlet and the Black. 🙂
  20. I think that Cruz or Kasich could have pulled most of the party together in 2016 if they’d gotten the nomination—there was certainly a “burn it all down” component to the GOP, but I think it was manageable back then. Nowadays . . . not so much.
  21. This seems kind of close to an et tu argument. And isn’t it coming perilously close to saying that “since Catholic A (who was a de facto hostage of Mussolini, and then Hitler) didn’t take more aggressive action when Catholic B (who was secretly but actively fighting Hitler) informed Catholic A of the Holocaust, Christians generally must assent to a repeat Holocaust whenever, wherever, and against whomever the leftist libertines and secularist sex fiends may hereafter demand”? (By the way, I’d encourage you to watch “The Scarlet and the Black” with Christopher Plummer and Gregory Peck at some point. It’s a nice little movie, and very thought-provoking.) At any rate, @Backroadsaccurately gets the gist of the reason for my hypothetical. Provided that the state of your democratic republic is still somewhat functional*, there are worse things than an electoral defeat. *Which, I grant, is arguably an increasingly tenuous assertion to make in this day and age . . .
  22. I agree with you in substance, @JohnsonJones, though I might quibble a smidge with the way you get there (I think 132:19–and verse 26–are each subtly referring to a different ordinance that makes an unconditional promise of exaltation). I’ve been reading Buerger’s “The Mysteries of Godliness” (definitely not for everyone; and though he has some interesting insights I think he largely missed the point of temple work generally and the endowment in particular); and he provided a quote from President Snow affirming that (this is me paraphrasing) exaltation could be gained without receiving what was then called the Second Anointing during one’s lifetime. (Buerger also suggests that in Joseph Smith’s day, having received this ordinance—also called receiving the “fullness of the priesthood”—was what separated the apostles from the other pretenders to Joseph’s mantle; and that Sidney Rigdon’s excommunication technically came because he hadn’t received the Second Anointing, but knew it existed, and so administered a version of it to himself in order to bolster his leadership claims.)
  23. I think, though, that the country was founded on the principle that some things are so morally repugnant that fighting against them—even when we know it’s a losing fight—is an ethical imperative. If Jew-lynching were legal and religious conservatives were trying to stop it, would libertarians and corporate conservatives be justified in trying to dissuade them for political reasons?
  24. In one respect, the primary source of the GOP’s woes right now is the Trump personality cult. Trump himself can’t win mainstream Americans (who, one hopes, are finally starting to see the results of the sort of intersectional politics that the Dems are beholden to, and would probably be open to a not-insane Republican). If any other GOP candidate gets the nomination, the Trump rump won’t turn out for the nominee and (s)he’ll likely lose. Trump’s legacy will be GOP party losses (and a stalemate/muted victory or two) in what should have been the very winnable years of 2018, 2020, 2022, and 2024. But in another respect: The Ohio abortion vote yesterday reminds us that we live in a country that has overwhelmingly embraced sex-without-consequences—and is willing to kill for it. Latter-day Saints can never be truly at home in such a nation. As for your last paragraph—I don’t know what “sustain your elected officials” even means. I’m certainly not plotting rebellion; but I don’t owe my elected officials the sorts of deference or support that the word “sustaining” typically connotes among Latter-day Saints.