Just_A_Guy

The legal lay of the land, FWIW, is laid out in Brandenburg v. Ohio; and Wikipedia’s treatment of that case is decent. My two thoughts are: 1). If I make a habit out of interpreting other peoples’ intemperate rhetoric uncharitably, I’d better be ready to see my own intemperate rhetoric similarly parsed; and 2). None of the examples cited in the OP strike me as being really helpful in the sense of advancing policy analysis through thoughtful discussion. They are more geared towards getting people whipped up into passionate state in hope that they will a) act now, or b) create a memory that will induce them to act later. That is, by its nature, a very delicate and dangerous game to be playing (especially if the passion you are eliciting is fear or anger); even if you think you’re being clear in expressing what you expect your audience to do or to not do. Now to be clear, I don’t think it creates legal responsibility for whatever a speaker’s moonbat fringe does thereafter. I’m not even persuaded that it creates moral responsibility. But I would be impressed by a candidate who simply chose not to play that game [of polemics; and instead tried to keep things relatively policy-oriented and analytical]; and I am increasingly gravitating to the position that political rallies are just plain stupid.

Enjoy! https://evidencecentral.org/recency/evidence/the-nephite-ark

I believe Don Bradley’s book on the 116 lost pages makes the case that Moroni’s stone box was a sort of Nephite equivalent of the Ark of the Covenant, with each item in the Nephite box having an equivalent to each item in the Israelite Ark. I lent my copy of the book to my FIL 6 months ago and haven’t gotten it back yet, so can’t go into more detail than that. But I think you’d enjoy the book.

Welcome!

I tend to get leery about trying to adapt ancient prophecy to modern political circumstances; especially for the purpose of developing and implementing civic policy. That said: 3 Nephi 20:14-17 seems to indicate that at some point during the last days the seed of the Lehites will be in (probable military) conflict with the seed of the “Gentiles” (Europeans?) who colonized the land; and that the seed of the Lehites will prevail at least over that portion of the Gentiles who will have rejected the Gospel. *Even if* we assume that this does indeed foretell some kind of ethnic or race war within the borders of the modern USA—why on earth would we, as Latter-day Saints, take political steps to identify ourselves with the side that a) the prophecy describes as being (more) wicked, and b) the prophecy strongly implies will lose?

Well, hang on a sec. Are they unionized?

Diner: “This smoked salmon isn’t the life-changing experience you said it would be.” Waiter: “Well, from the fish’s perspective—it was!”

But it is violence, @The Folk Prophet; or pretty darned near. We aren't talking about rational debate, discussion, elections, and the traditional civic process. We're talking about physically breaking up someone else's meeting, which has historically been a precursor for mob violence. Whether the rationale is "well, if it does turn violent, we can definitely take these losers!" or simply "the [silent] majority of the country actually agrees with us"--that doesn't make it right, or effective in the long term. OK, your verbiage about a "lost cause situation" threw me for a loop there. Apologies for any misinterpretation. I surmise we'd feel rather differently if it had been one of our own church meetings that was broken up. [Tangent] I've never encountered BACA. Some of my colleagues did, ten or twenty years ago. Their impressions were: 1) BACA tended to go off half-cocked without knowing all the facts; and in a significant minority of cases were unwitting deployed as pawns in some sort of child custody spitting match; 2) BACA often showed up at hearings where the child wasn't even present; 3) Courthouses (at least, in our neck of the woods) have long had procedures to prevent direct contact between victims and accusers in courthouse hallways or what-have-you; and 4) At least on courthouse premises, never was there ever a genuine security threat that court security personnel were unable to handle without BACA assistance. BACA's hearts, I think, are in the right places. And maybe it serves some sort of therapeutic purpose for the child just knowing that their abuser is now as terrified as the child used to be. But I'm not convinced that there's not a little element of BACA that just enjoys bullying people who society has agreed ought to be bullied. Awesome. Sure; and I think the issue of "well, how would we look at it if it were being done to us rather than by us", is an appropriate part of feeling out the contours as to what is a good idea versus a neutral idea versus a terrible idea. My old debate coach used to say "never run an argument you can't beat, because in the next tournament you may be assigned to argue the opposite side and someone will remember your 'bulletproof' argument from the last tournament and use it against you." If we have a perpetually-sustainable physical means to prevent our meetings from being hijacked by the same sorts of antics that these guys deployed against the drag queens--well, knock yourself out, I guess. But if we don't, then you'd better get ready to make a persuasive argument to the civic authorities about why we should be afforded a civic right (in this case, to meet unmolested in our own spaces) that we weren't willing to afford to others. And, "they're perverts and we aren't!" is not a persuasive argument to civic authorities. That's fair. I guess what I'm seeing, is a paradigm of reciprocity in civil discourse that is rapidly fading away; and antics like this speed that process. It's easy to dismiss a certain class of conservative as being too process-oriented to accomplish much; and much of the 2016 Republican primary revolved around that issue. But I continue to maintain that we're going to sorely miss those procedural safeguards when they're gone. There seems to be a broad belief among many conservatives (and frankly, liberals as well) that we can tweak each other as much as we please but that our fundamental civic order will endure regardless of our own actions. By contrast, I find our civic order to be a terrifyingly fragile thing; and for all their talk of SHTF scenarios--I don't think conservatives understand just how horrific things are likely to get when the status quo disappears. (I mean yeah, eventually Christ comes and everything's great. But before then there's short-term riots and looting and rape gangs; intermediate possible armed intervention by foreign troops breeding more looting and rape gangs as well as re-distribution of children and forced re-education and relocation; and the longer term, probably some form of slavery or other perpetual human trafficking slavery. It's been the default human condition for almost all of recorded history.) The assumptions here are that a) they will give up at some point; b) there's momentum to be built through this tactic that can't effectively be built through other means; c) we aren't actually undercutting our own momentum by letting dozens of kids see us engaging in behavior that we would typically associate with bullying; and d) the news coverage we get is, if not overtly favorable, at least balanced. I see little reason to accept any of those four assumptions. My take is largely the same as yours here; though I think Pocatello is probably a pretty favorable playing field for getting the local authorities to act to end this kind of nonsense. And if it is true that we have lost all hope of prevailing through the democratic process, then the simple fact is that if we want to get what we want, it has to be through bloodshed (or emigration, I suppose). Which I think should make us think long and hard about what it is, exactly, that we want. 1. Are we really willing to see the remnants of our democratic republic fall apart so that we can dictate to LBGTQ-friendly parents, how they ought to raise their kids? 2. Or is the specter of someone else corrupting their own youth something we're willing to live with, so long as we can effectively raise our own children in accordance with the dictates of our own consciences? Quite bluntly--if I'm going to get involved in extralegal activities/government confrontation such that I will lose my job, my savings, and my employability; possibly my liberty; possibly my home; possibly the safety/freedom/innocence of the people I love the most; and, after all that, end my days holed up in a compound taking pot shots at ATF guys in armored vehicles--I'm willing to do that for scenario 2, I suppose; but absolutely not for scenario 1. Boy, based on some of the replies we seem to have opened the Pandora's box here! Let me talk about the broad concept first, and then I can engage in psychoanalysis of our friend @prisonchaplain for a bit. The broad concept, again, is that you don't give people tools that are likely to be used against you (or, by engaging in particular behaviors, normalize them such that--again--they get used against you). Now, as to @prisonchaplain and our Christian (especially: Protestant) cousins generally: My understanding (and I welcome correction) is that our LDS willingness to "grade" sins is something of an idiosyncrasy, at least in Protestant circles. For many Protestants, sin is sin. Sin separates us from God, period. Whoever transgresses one provision of the law transgresses the whole thing, et cetera, et cetera. Fundamentally you're either saved with Jesus, or you're not. And, we're the "nots". Now, our American tradition of peaceful coexistence means that we don't say this out loud very often; and when we feel compelled to do so for the sake of accuracy in discourse, many (not all) of us couch it in as gentle terms as we can. In our particular culture, starting fights of this nature is just incompetent communication and bad evangelism. Additionally, some (maybe many) Christians genuinely mourn to have to say such a thing. (Others I've met shrug it off, saying that if an impassive God doesn't mind damning people, they as humans won't get too worked up about seeing others damned either). Whatever their personal emotions may be about our damnability as Mormons, I am fairly confident in asserting that it is what the vast majority of them believe. And frankly, given that that's what they sincerely believe-- @prisonchaplain is too much of a gentleman to say it very boldly; but I do want him to want to interrupt my (as he sees them) indoctrination of damnable heresies on impressionable young minds; and to pull my kids away from my home--either permanently or, at least, for several hours of each school day--so that they can be reared (or at least, re-educated) by good, saved, orthodox Christians. That desire tells me that @prisonchaplain respects my children's humanity, loves them, and wants the best for them (as he sees it); so I don't hold that against him. To the contrary--I honor him for it. But, as a parent who holds his own religious beliefs to be correct and Prisonchaplain's to be erroneous: I want to live in a society that has agreed that in this material world Prisonchaplain shouldn't have the ability to do this thing that he desperately wants to do; regardless of the purity of his motives. So when we ally with other Christians for the suppression of dangerous ideas and practices--I think we should always be wary about how that kind of suppression might ultimately be deployed against us; and when the proposal is that we band together to take physical or generally-extralegal measures to get our way--to me, that's an absolute nonstarter. The Presiding High Priest over the individuals involved in this particular action, seems to agree.

No, but it absolves you against accusations of softness. War for war’s sake doesn’t automatically assign morality to its participants, sure. But at anding up against homicidal/genocidal maniacs like Hitler/Mussolini/Hirohito’s clowns/Stalin . . . That took a monumental degree of moral virtue. Surely, virtue in one area doesn’t exonerate vice in another. But then again, the discussion wasn’t about vice or virtue generally; it was specifically about toughness versus softness. Virtue becomes possible only when toughness contains the egregiously, recalcitrantly vicious. To preen about our own own virtue in the face of undeniable evidence that we are indeed, “soft” in comparison to our forbears is all well and good . . . Until our country is reduced to waging Twitter campaigns against latter-day Hitlers like Putin or the Taliban or Boko Haram because a critical mass of our youth are physically unfit for military service.

You know, I have a lot of issues with the Boomer generation. But, in fairness to them--the Boomers were largely the ones who faced down the Klan, the riot dogs, the tear gas, and the fire hoses in order to demand the end of practices such as the ones you decide. It was the “greatest generation”, and their antecedents, who had the problem with swimming pools. Then again, they at least defeated the combined forces of Hitler, Hirohito and Mussolini on a global stage and then went on to contain Stalin’s and Mao’s dreams of global domination. Whatever their problem was, it wasn’t “softness”; whereas our generation hasn’t really accomplished anything on the worldwide stage except to start a succession of wars and then stab a parade of international allies in the back when gritty photos circulated by journalists who wanted us to lose those wars, gave us the sadz. And at the rate we're going, we'll be lucky if fully half of the rising generation ever gets outside enough to even learn how to swim in the first place.

I confess, I don't quite follow the line of reasoning here. We're gonna engage in behavior that will almost certainly lead to brawls with people who expose their kids to stuff we don't like because . . . we [are pretty darned sure we] can win those brawls? Sure; but the "fight" should have been carried out (much more effectively) via the political and legal and cultural and intellectual (and, to the degree possible, spiritual) arenas; not through physical disruption and/or intimidation. Happy to see them regulated/prohibited via state action. Also don't mind seeing the funders, employees, and patrons being identified and publicly named and shunned by individuals who wish to shun them. But, not a fan of physically going to those sites and protesting, or entering and taking a seat and witnessing the show under the delusion that I'm somehow preserving someone's innocence. I thought we'd just agreed that the proper "how" had pretty much been abandoned (or, at any rate, not fully tried)? And . . . we do realize that most of the non-LDS at that protest consider us to be just as damned, and our children in just as grave eternal danger, as they consider the participants of that drag queen story hour--right? That in their eyes, we all go to the same Hell anyways? That, if they thought they'd get away with it, they'd do exactly the same thing to us as they just did to the drag queens, and probably even more (as proven by the behavior of their sectarian ancestors across multiple American jurisdictions over the past two centuries)?

For some reason, I can't start new topics under the "Third Hour Articles" sub-forum. But, there are two new articles up on the main Third Hour page!

Let’s not get crazy, now . . .

In D&C 19:6-7, the takeaway almost seems to be that the Lord will (if not lie to us) tell us things He knows we will construe in a particular (inaccurate) way if it leads us to actually doing what He wants done in a particular moment. I don’t know how that squares with Enos’s description of God as being a god who cannot lie; but it’s food for thought.

Yeah, but you kept your hair. 😡

Listen, whippersnapper, I . . . [looks at watch] Ooh! Nap time! We can finish this later.

[Morgan Freeman voice-over]: “But as LDSGator boarded his plane to go to the Davos summit it occurred to him that one of them was, in fact, ‘that influential’”.

Not necessarily. In tort law, there are certain activities deemed "ultra-hazardous" where even if I do the activity with all reasonable caution (keeping a known-vicious dog as a pet, for example; or manufacturing dynamite) and someone still gets hurt--I can be held strictly liable even though I wasn't found to be negligent. I haven't read the Florida bill; but it seems like one might argue that transgender surgeries are ultra-hazardous, at least for children (it's not a half-bad argument, given that apparently 4/5 of transgender youths eventually grow out of it and eventually become comfortable with their own bodies if they don't receive "gender-affirming care"); and that people who aid and abet such surgeries should be held strictly liable for the consequences of their actions. That said--under that rubric, the bill (as represented here) seems awfully selective. One would think the natural approach would be for parents, insurers, doctors and mental health providers to be held jointly and severally liable for de-transitioning costs of an adult who transitioned as a minor; and for the latter two categories to also be compelled to disgorge any payments received for their role in the original transition. [I must have a twisted mind, because I just imagined the following exchange: Inigo Montoya: "Offer me money." Rugen: "Yes!" Montoya: "Power, too, promise me that." Rugen: "All that I have and more. Please . . ." Montoya: "Offer me anything I ask for." Rugen: "Anything you want!" Montoya: "I want my ability to have children back, you son of a %#^&!"]

That's a luxury one has when one is in a permanent majority and is confident that one's children and grandchildren will remain so. It's also, to my view, not a luxury that we (whether you define "we" as Latter-day Saints, or Christians, or people with a sense of sexual probity, or people who think childhood innocence is to be valued, or people who gladly embrace the overall Judeo-Christian-Enlightenment moral or civic values our parents handed down to us) possess. It's not a question of whether the activities are morally equivalent. It's a question of whether they, like we, should have the rights to--once having made a contract for the use of a particular space in order to voluntarily associate with like-minded people--have that contract honored. Of whether they, like we, should be allowed to be the final determiners of what controversial moral values (or lack thereof) their children are exposed to. I think history shows that whenever the Church has had to resort to the field of physical confrontation--we've lost. Sometimes spectacularly, catastrophically so. Frankly, there are already existing laws about exposure of children to sexualized material, whether gay or straight or tranny; and even parents don't have the right to expose their kids to that. If that's what's happening at drag queen story hour, then by all means society should act (through appropriate channels). But if drag queen story hour is more about dudes wearing dresses that basically cover the essentials: Is it wrong? Absolutely. Stupid? Yep. Unhealthy? Most likely. Of myself, I'd prefer to see it restricted by law and/or policy. But if the law chooses not to address it--well, then, what is your grand strategy to sustainably, permanently keep parents from doing wrong/ stupid/ unhealthy stuff with their own children; and how does a single physical confrontation advance that strategy? Precisely which children, as a result of this activity, were assured a safe and virtuous upbringing over the long term? Whose innocence was preserved? Who felt the ennobling influence of the Holy Ghost? Whose mind was enlightened? Who was inspired to virtue? Whose soul was saved? The most likely outcome here was that a smattering of deeply misguided parents couldn't get their little ones in to see real, live drag queens reading books; so instead they went home and tuned into YouTube to see real, online drag queens engaged in activities that were probably decidedly less tame than reading books. Along the way, those kiddies did get firsthand exposure to people being jerks for Jesus; which I'm sure won't leave them with any lasting negative impressions about Christians/Mormons at all. But, hey--we broke up an event, gave the sadz to some adult weirdos who frankly probably deserved it, and "owned the libs" for a day. So . . . what? Yay, us, I guess? Now, if LGBTQ advocates are insisting on their right to expose my children to that kind of stuff without notice or consent, then I can see more of a justification for resorting to physical force or perhaps (once all legal avenues are exhausted) even violence; because at that point my civil liberties are under attack and we're back to the justification set forth in the Declaration of Independence. But so far as I know, that's not what was happening in Pocatello. For me, the question begged by these activists' tactics is not when, but how. "Society" passes laws and elects representatives who then prescribe policies and hire or dismiss various bureaucrats in accordance with the perceived will of the people. That's not what happened in Pocatello. This wasn't the civic process. This was a bullying mob--a polite bullying mob, perhaps; but a bullying mob nonetheless.

The impression that I get via the Twitter feeds of some knowledgeable folks is that this (shell corporations) does happen quite a bit in the for-profit world. Maybe they are more careful to make sure the shells are actually making independent investment divisions (unlike the Church’s shells, which were wholly directed by Salt Lake); or maybe this symbolizes a broader shift in the way the SEC is going to start approaching these kinds of situations. The relatively minuscule size of the penalty suggests to me that the SEC is largely buying the Church’s protestations that it acted on legal advice in good faith.

This isn’t technically a tax issue; it’s an investment disclosure issue. I am not an expert in securities law; but I think the fundamental rationale behind these kinds of requirements is that the market wants to know who the high rollers are and corporations want to know who their (voting) shareholders are (or, in the light of various acquisition/buyout offers, are likely to be). I don’t think it’s THAT big of a deal for an investor like the Church, whose strategy is usually to buy and hold for the long term and (as far as I know) doesn’t tend to get very aggressive about the business plan or intra-managerial politics of the corporations it holds shares in. But in the world of venture capital, it could be more of an issue.

KSL news story SEC settlement order SEC press release Church press release Thoughts: 1) Given the size of the funds at play, $5 million is a slap on the wrist, 2) Lesson to self: never assume the Church’s lawyers know what they’re doing.

Well over a decade ago, we had a forum member posting under the name “nation of Deseret” or some such thing, and trying to push it as an idea/culture/shadow government (and was hawking merch with a poached logo, IIRC). I’ve always wondered if that guy had anything to do with the hashtag “movement”.

Perhaps of some interest: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/u-2-spy-planes-snooped-on-chinese-surveillance-balloon

[I tweaked my post a bit while you were responding; so I'll leave this for a while in case you want to make any amendments. Catch you later! ]