Just_A_Guy

I’m not following this closely; but some Dem acquaintance of mine on Facebook says that it was actually Trump who initiated the office. I’d be interested to learn more here. Whatever the case, the new nominee seems to have a history that rather disqualifies her from defining “disinformation” . . .

One of the wonderful things about being a Latter-day Saint is that I can lie every day and twice on Sunday about what “my bishop told me” in a private meeting; and my bishop is prohibited from publicly refuting my lies by covenant, church policy, and (in jurisdictions that recognize priest/penitent privilege) by applicable evidentiary law. I wouldn’t be surprised if his bishop had said “well, that’s not excommunicable behavior”. But then again: It is also not excommunicable behavior to cut off my own arm, or inject crystallized caffeine intravenously, or throw myself from the topmost pinnacle of the Salt Lake Temple in anticipation of being caught by heavenly angels. But, given that I claim to accept the Gospel and given what the Gospel teaches I am to strive to become—my doing any of the above would be pretty darned stupid. And I’ve never seen a bishop use his priesthood authority to explicitly approve of darned stupid behavior.

That’s kind of ironic, given the current topic of discussion . . .

Shrier, I should note, focuses particularly on the transgender craze as it pertains to young girls. She has no problem with homosexuality, or even with gender transition by adults with legitimate diagnoses of gender dysphoria following evidence-based therapies. In fact, she suggests that many “transgender” girls are actually lesbians who have internalized some measure of “homophobia”/anti-lesbian prejudice from their surroundings (she notes that in the LGBTQ hierarchy, lesbian institutions/associations/bars/etc are under continual assault by transgender advocates). And she is sympathetic to adult transgender folks who just want to be left alone. But some of her major points are: —Until the early 21st century, people diagnosed with gender dysphoria were 90+% male and diagnoses were usually based on collateral contacts (including parents) saying “yeah, we’ve known something was different about him since he was 3”. Now, it’s like 65+% female, and it’s sudden onset, with parents (even progressive/LGBTQ-friendly ones) (and a significant majority of transgender folk grew up in white, highly educated, affluent, progressive homes) saying “there was never any indication of this until she started hanging out with these people and following these YouTube stars, and then she came out to us a couple of months later”. —A thriving online community of transgender activists openly coaches kids about how to lie about their symptoms to get treatment, an increasing number of therapists don’t use any diagnostic criteria other than “she says she has gender dysphoria, so she does”, and the “watch and wait” therapeutic approach has largely been supplanted by openly affirmative regimens that, deliberately or not, cement questioning kids into a transgender identity. —Educational systems at every level are bending over backwards to expose students to this, including kindergartners; and in some cases to begin providing hormone therapy—all behind the parents’ backs. —Hormone therapies are being granted (frankly, peddled) with nothing approaching “informed consent”. Trans influencers and even health care professionals are telling people that it’s easy to de-transition (it’s not), that puberty blockers are safe (they’re not), and that hormone treatments and surgical interventions are fully reversible (ABSOLUTELY not). (Her description of the procedure and risks inherent to phalloplasty was particularly gruesome.) Shrier says that the parents she talked to who were most successful in fending off trans ideation among their very young daughters before things spun out of control, were those who were willing to take the drastic step of pulling up stakes and moving the entire family.

I’ve been a DCFS lawyer for about five years now. I got my first case involving a kid who happened to be transgender, about nine months ago. Since then I’ve gotten five more. (They aren’t under DCFS supervision because they’re transgender; they came in for other issues.) Something very, very odd is occurring. Shrier points out a lot of interesting common threads among the cases she discusses. She basically looks at it as a “craze”—a continuation of the same phenomena that gave us the Salem witch trials, recovered memory of sexual abuse, etc; exacerbated by social media.

(Amazon link) Has anyone read this? I just finished it and IMHO it is essential reeding for any parent of a tween/teen girl.

It’s not worth its own thread at this point; but Adam Berg (formerly of Studio C) just came out on Twitter this month, as well.

You’re certainly right that our theology emphasizes the role of community both as an end of salvation and as a means of salvation, though I might quibble about whether some of the examples you cite are really manifestations of this culture. I imagine in both religions, people can see the way an adherent lives his life and note incongruities between what the adherent claims to believe versus what he actually does. I guess the question is, in Catholicism, whether the institutional church and/or individual laypersons a) believe that such incongruities may actually cause a third party to lose their salvation, and b) the degree to which they believe that an individual’s losing their salvation represents a loss to the community as a whole, and the nature of any theological/moral obligation the community may have to try to minister to/bring back the wayward. And perhaps I have over-generalized about Catholicism generally. Frankly, I just don’t know what to think—it was Catholic culture, as I understand it, that gave us Carnival/Mardi Gras with their “go ahead and get all your sins out now” ethos; and it’s odd to me that (from my outsiders perspective) the Catholic hierarchy hasn’t formally condemned this mindset that I trust, per the actual theology, would be widely acknowledged as being spiritually toxic.

Meh. Food production on an industrialized scale is just a vestige of western colonialism, anyways.

The funny thing to me (and this is probably a really superficial take, but it’s rooted in my having served a mission in heavily-Catholic Latin America) is: —Catholics say works matter, but tend to live as though they don’t. —Protestants say works don’t matter, but tend to live as though they do. (Even liberal social-justice-type Protestants seem, in practice, to be careful to avoid “sin”; they just redefine what type of activities are “sinful”). I don’t get it; because I agree with you that the net effect of (what I know of) Catholic theology tends to strongly disincentivize sin, whereas (what I know of) most Protestant theology tends to look rather benignly at sin so long as the sinner can recite the proper soteriological and trinitarian shibboleths.

If the things that are alleged to have happened in 2020 really happened, then why do we have any reason to believe the Democratic Party will ever lose its House and Senate majorities ever again?

Why is it a problem if our God is actually the source of most things rather than every thing? Why is it a problem if there are other (law-abiding) beings who existed before He did? The fact that there are people who are older and wealthier than my own dad, and the fact that he went to university rather than being self-taught, doesn’t change the nature of our unique relationship. (Though I admit, there was a time in grade school when I had a deep-seated need to believe that my dad could beat up the dad of every other kid in school, I eventually outgrew that need as I came to understand and (mostly) trust my safety in the broader social system in which I and my father existed.) It seems to me that much of Christendom worship God’s superlative attributes (primarily His power and eternal nature), and then only secondarily embrace and appreciate His character and goodness and the relationship he offers with us. In the Church, we almost do the opposite—we start with His character, build a relationship with Him based on that and the healing He assures us He can provide, and only later (or sometimes, not at all) star worrying about whether He is reeally, worlds without end, the absolute toughest Guy in the room.

I agree with @prisonchaplain. I don’t know how to raise a kid so that he’s a little minion of Satan in front of the people I don’t like, and a model child when he’s around people I do like. Parents who try to do that, I think, are likely to screw up their kids generally; and I’d like to think that most people (especially conservatives) understand this as a matter of intuition/common sense. As to the discussion about home schooling: one of my favorite COVID memes came out very early in the pandemic; it was: ”Day 5 of lockdown with my kids; and I’m beginning to wonder if the Donner Party was even hungry.”

You’re a better man than me. I’d be livid.

So, I don’t think it’s a blanket forgiveness that’s been under discussion. Let me use my own experience to illustrate: I graduated from law school in 2008 with about $90K of federally subsidized loan debt. At the time the job market was horrible; I hung out my own shingle but was just barely getting by and was living in my in-laws basement. I was told that I could apply for a “forbearance”—basically a one-year suspension of payments while I got my job situation figured out; after which I would start making payments and over time, it was expected, pay off the loan in full. IIRC federal policy allowed up to three years of forbearance. In 2009 my financial situation was still tenuous, so I took another forbearance. In 2010 I became aware of another federal option called “Income-based repayment”, where you pay a reduced payment calculated as a percentage of your income and expenses over a fixed term (20 years, I think, with the payment amount recalculated annually based on your most recent tax return) and at the end of the 20 years, whatever isn’t paid is discharged (with the discharged amount being considered taxable income). I’ve been doing that since then. Since going to work for the state in 2017 I am also eligible for Public Service Loan Forgiveness (the concept underlying that program is that people working for the state or in other forms of public service/nonprofit make less than workers in the public sector and thus need some extra incentive to go into public service); which means that as long as I make my payments for ten years, I can have my remaining debt forgiven at the end of them and it won’t be deemed taxable income. These all—forbearance, IBR, and PSLF—are pre-Biden programs. What Biden is doing is saying “hey, JAG, maybe we should have worked harder to make sure you knew about IBR before we let you take that forbearance. So, we are just going to take the two years you were in forbearance and count them as IBR, so in your case your IBR plan will end two years early.” Similarly, if I had been eligible for the PSLF program while I took my forbearances (which I wasn’t, but speaking hypothetically here)—those forbearance years would be credited to my PSLF program. Now, from a policy standpoint: because I know those programs exist, I am strongly opposed to any additional loan forgiveness regimen. So what if I have to stay in IBR or PSLF for an additional two years? If I didn’t take advantage of the programs earlier—that’s on me, not the government or the taxpayers. As with so many other categories of “poor” people—relief is already available to those who want to and are willing to deal with the bureaucracies that administer it. And frankly, I think the pre-Biden programs were too generous and shift too much of the burden to the taxpayer. I do think borrower relief should be available, because schools for decades have had a history of padding their post-graduation employment and earnings stats and I think a lot of college students (especially undergrads) have been actively deceived as to the value of the product they are purchasing. (And frankly, state universities and state high schools have played a major role in this deception.). But I think the simpler and more elegant approach would be: 1) Get the federal government out of the student loan business. Public high school career development/guidance counseling offices need to be reformed to de-emphasize college and give equal time to trade schools and other blue-collar career paths. 2) Make student debt dischargeable in bankruptcy ten years after graduation; with the bankruptcy trustee being empowered to claw back from the university up to 50% of tuition payments received in the 15-year period before the bankruptcy filing. 3) Keep IBR, but limit the program to ten years and do not offer loan forgiveness at the end of them (borrowers wanting the forgiveness will have to go the bankruptcy route, if they qualify). 4) I’m indifferent about the PSLF program. I’m ordinarily leery of redistributionist schemes and bureaucratic nest-feathering with the public purse. On the other hand, it can also be seen as primarily an HR issue rather than a social welfare one—in my office we’ve had a position open for five months now, and we’ve made offers to three or four potential new hires only to have them come back at the last minute and tell us that they’ve received an offer at a private firm that we, as a state agency, just can’t match. And of course, being a participant in the program myself, there’s always a measure of self-interest at play . . .

In general, the factions of the various parties will likely still hold together under their existing party frameworks so long as they fear/despise the other party more than they fear/despise their sometime-allies within their own party. I can’t speak to the Democratic Party; but on the right—there seem to be a lot of folks who (dumbly, IMHO) think Romney, Flake, and Liz Cheney are just as dangerous as Biden, Pelosi, and AOC; and there were also a lot of Republicans who felt a Biden administration would in the long term be less harmful (both to the GOP and the country) than a second Trump term.

Ukraine is now saying that virtually the entire crew was killed. I’ve always felt that sailors tend to die the most gruesome deaths—pretty much any method of death available to other soldiers and airmen is an occupational risk of being in a navy; plus drowning, suffocation, physical entrapment in a confined space, and exposure/starvation/thirst/shark attack after surviving the sinking of your ship. And the deaths can often take hours or days with no hope of relief (we know that at Pearl Harbor, it took some trapped sailors on the West Virginia nearly three weeks to die). My loathing of Russians grows daily as I hear more about mass murders of civilians and women encouraging their soldier husbands to commit rape—but still, I wouldn’t wish this on anyone.

That’s fair, though it’s also worth noting that a) (with a very few notable exceptions) no one who met Christ during His lifetime accepted Him except those who had already accepted the Law of Moses; and b) everyone who received the Gospel after Christ’s death, received it through the preaching of someone who was either a Jew or had accepted fundamentally Jewish perceptions of God, the creation, the afterlife, and morality/ethics. There are today 10-20 million Jews who reject Christ’s divinity. Let us assume that the majority of them do that out of a theological attachment to the Law of Moses, rather than for social or political reasons. You still have over a billion Christians who converted because of a book (the Bible) that came to them, as Nephi says, “out of the mouth of a Jew”. For every modern Jew for whom the Law of Moses has become a stumbling block, there are literally fifty modern Christians for whom it has proved an instrument of salvation.

Maintaining a cultural identity over the fifteen hundred years between Moses and Christ—or, thirty-five hundred years between Moses and the present day—is no small accomplishment; and if the bulk of Jews failed (and continue to fail) to see their Messiah in the man Yeshua bin Yusuf, we can at least give credit to the fact that there were (and are) still Jews awaiting a Messiah at all.

This. I’ve never been diagnosed, but I can certainly get into funks now and then . . . And when I’m in one, I frankly resent anyone who suggests to me that it may be possible for me to eventually be pulled out of it. I *suspect* that one of the really ticklish things about depression is that it plays with one’s head in such a way that when one has it, it becomes a downward spiral and one tends to resist doing/hearing some of the things the things that could help alleviate the symptoms. Not that one can or should be expected to merely “snap out of it”, of course; but there are things one can do that often help to varying degrees, and that the depression itself often dissuaded one from doing. 😞

I can back this up. Over the past year I’ve not had my iPhone/GospelLibrary app in Gospel Doctrine class (as part of my calling I’ve been using its hotspot and my laptop/webcam in order to broadcast the class to homebound members during COVID, and it’s a little temperamental so I prefer to just set it on a table and let it do its thing ubdisturbed); so I’ve resorted to bringing paper scriptures to Church like it’s 2005 or something. Several times I’ve been rushed and just grabbed my NSRV Study Bible on the way out the door because it was more convenient, and no one has ever said anything.

Yes, feminists in and out of the Church have long used this scripture to assert biblical precedent for ordination of women to the priesthood (because in Greek, Junia is a feminine name, IIRC). To be fair, they didn’t make this up from whole cloth: the text on its own was troublesome enough that some early Christian writers (c 4th-5th century) tried to change “Junia” to the masculine “Junias”.

This. A good study Bible will usually have footnotes explaining potentially-ambiguous translations, though. The NET Bible (online) is really good at this.

Yeesh. And as it is, we get all kinds of grief just because in 1981 we “updated” the Book of Mormon to match what it said in 1840. Either we get an updated Bible translation that dilutes much of the BoM and D&C and POGP’s meaning, or we update the LDS scriptures and expose ourselves to not-wholly-unfounded allegations of scriptural whitewash. The status quo comes off looking like the least-bad option here. Although, maybe the Church could beef up GospelLibrary or develop a new program like Logos or MySword or BYU’s Scripture Citation Index, that would contain Church as well as third-party content with split screens that let the user flip between alternate translations and academic as well as GA commentaries within a few clicks/taps.

Wayment went on a Dialogue-run Come Follow Me Youtube broadcast a couple of weeks ago, took a long-standing minority rabbinical fringe theory that Joseph of Egypt may have been gay (because he was hawt, wore fancy clothes, and played with boys, or something) and represented it as “The rabbis say Joseph was gay”—passing it off as a universally-acknowledge historical truth. He then hinted that since Joseph-as-deliverer is a type for Jesus, that maybe Jesus was gay (or at least so effeminate as to be “queer” for modern purposes) too; and that a cisgender “masculine” male could never fulfill the role of “savior” as the Jews understood it.