NeuroTypical

Oh yeah. I didn't see it happen, but I'm assuming the neighbor was "jus' tryin' ta sceer him off". Still got arrested and hauled away.

Heh. And within a week of me making this post, we came home to discover our quiet little neighborhood in the middle of nowhere, full of red and blue lights. Apparently one of my neighbors (and I can't tell you how unsurprised I was to learn which one), had shot at a gas company guy for trying to do gas company things on their property. I may have posted pictures of their property with all the high fences and trump flags before. We'll never see this neighbor in any sort of political demonstration characterized by the media as 'alt-right'.

While I absolutely agree, I would also claim that it is possible to both forgive someone and fully prosecute them for their crimes. Even if the sentence is death.

I've watched this argument 20 years ago: 1. "Israel are the bad guys because they kill innocent Palestinians and destroy their homes and buildings." 2. "No, the terrorists are the bad guys because they surround themselves with innocent Palestinians as they conduct terrorist operations against Israel. Israelies are the good guys because they do everything they can to avoid loss of innocent life, including notifying people of upcoming operations. This allows the terrorists to escape, but it also protects innocent life." 3. [The first person either refuses to acknowledge the facts, or changes the subject to criticize settlements or Israel's right to exist or whatever, or even mounts an unwitting defense of the terrorist's actions.] I'm sad at all the death that started on J6. I'm hopeful that the needle will finally move, and the world will see the moral and just value of #2, and give up #3. A similar thing needed to happen with the axis powers in WWII. The Nazi government and it's fascist powers in Italy needed to be soundly defeated and all of it's defenders killed. When it collapsed and the perpetrators of the vile ideology scattered like rats, it kicked off 80 years of pursuing them across the world to bring them to justice and execute them. The same needs to happen with Hamas and Hezbollah and Houthis and Iran. It's hard to think that a good solution involves utterly destroying everyone that thinks differently than you on a certain topic. It's chilling to think that the BoM tells a handful of stories of the righteous folks doing exactly that. It's difficult for me to come to grips that God picks this outcome on certain occasions, with the most pressing example being the coming end of days when the wicked shall burn as stubble, and every knee shall bow and every tongue confess - because everyone else will have been destroyed. I spent 20 years looking for an alternative. A way to change #3 without bloodshed. But it never came. We were so close on J5. The Abraham accords were working. The week before J6, the first Israeli diplomat ever had just flown to Saudi Arabia to discuss some low level thing about agricultural cooperation. It's how peace grows. But then the Palestinian government did what it has always done - be a willing pawn in the game of those who want to destroy Israel. There's no gladness or happiness to be had, but I respect Israel for saying enough.

Yep. This story pretty much ended all the 'police systematic racism' arguments out there.

Just a question – do you not have emotions involved in your children? I have emotions about everything. 17 years into an intentional journey to grow my emotional resiliency, I only rarely have emotional pain about things. I wouldn't consider sadness, concern, fear, worry, or any other such emotion to be "emotional pain". The time my barefoot daughter screamed in pain and fell to the floor clutching her foot, and that's how I learned what happened to that tack I had lost - that gave me some emotional pain.

When my kids were younger and getting into shenanigans, I'd think about the scripture "suffer the little children to come unto Me and forbid them not to come unto me", and wonder vaguely if it was an invitation to send 'em home early. As far as emotional pain, I'm of the opinion that emotions spring from our deeply held core beliefs about ourselves. And if we believe something that isn't true (anything from pride, to trusting in your arm of flesh, to failing to follow the commandment to love thyself), we end up having emotional pain when those beliefs translate into behavior and we crash into reality.

It's me. I'm "they". I got an account violation ding from Facebook for sharing a link to a New York Post article, and I have never shut up about it. I probably never will. These are some of the screen grabs I took when Facebook was silencing me: This is me, making a huge dang spectacle of myself when the most popular social media platform on the planet was taking marching orders from the government on who to cherry-pick for a ban: And in case you missed it, here are some links to the investigative journalism that exposed the Biden/FB conspiracy to silence certain opiners: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/zuckerberg-says-the-white-house-pressured-facebook-to-censor-some-covid-19-content-during-the-pandemic https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2024/08/28/facebook-censorship-covid-biden-harris-social-media/74966270007/ And let's not forget when Twitter was taking marching orders from the FBI: https://oversight.house.gov/release/the-cover-up-big-tech-the-swamp-and-mainstream-media-coordinated-to-censor-americans-free-speech-/ https://www.thefire.org/news/yes-you-should-be-worried-about-fbis-relationship-twitter https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/07/24/fbi-contacts-social-media-inspector-general-doj/ https://www.wsj.com/video/series/opinion-review-and-outlook/wsj-opinion-twitter-and-the-fbi-censorship-subsidiary/E292F2B0-22C5-4A96-A7C0-784F36B96490 If it's ok with you, I'll use every platform that'll allow me, to spread the message about the evils of government censorship, and how me and mine were being actively silenced by both elected and unelected officials. I'm hoping this post will help you reflect on how smart it is to laugh at someone you can hear, when they're complaining about being silenced by the government. And finally, to tie my rant into the point of this thread, there is an obvious difference between government-run entities not saying things, and the government suppressing people and organizations from saying things. Please let me know if you disagree or feel the distinction isn't that important. I'd love to hear your reasoning.

Interesting how the pendulum swings. Change the names to New York Times and MSNBC, and it's still true.

So, that's my thing. Yes, these horrible people exist. My point is that calling them right or extreme right or alt-right is silly and dumb and misses what the right is about. I figure the left wants to paint these folks as somehow associated with me and mine, so they apply the labels. I figure these folks themselves are running off of ignorance, fear, and hate, and know pretty much nothing about conservatism, so they don't bother to reject the labels. I reject the label. I don't recognize any of these people as "mine". They're not on my side of the fence. The stuff they're advocating for, I'm against. They're not more extreme versions of me. I realize my voice is in the minority here, but the entire world and all the media and talking heads and opiners and folks with opinions are wrong here, and I'm correct. Or more to the point, Plato and his theory of forms is more correct. A chair has 4 legs, a seat, a backrest, and maybe armrests. Once it replaces one of it's legs with a desire for Trump to torture immigrants, or it's backrest with a policy to imprison transgender people based on their speech, it ceases being a chair. Agreed, and me neither. My point is: When the right gets extreme it doesn't go fascist or authoritarian - it turns into a conspiracy nut flying a flag and waving a shotgun out of his 2nd story window demanding to be left alone. When the left gets extreme they go fascist and authoritarian - because you need power and government force at your back to implement the changes you want. Jordan Peterson's comments on the American right and left are pretty on point, and I think you might agree: JordanPetersonOnDiversity.MP4 You're absolutely correct when you talk in your other post about how hard it is to avoid arguing from the extremes. I think you can already guess the answer to most of these, but for the record: - Fighting radical gender theory in our schools mean administrators need to come up with and defend a policy that gives the most amount of benefit and the least amount of harm. I'm not a huge fan of school administrators, and I'm certainly not willing to defend extreme examples. But I understand the position they are in, and you should also. - The vast, vast, VAAAAAAAAST majority of abortions being elective, and medically necessary abortions number in perhaps maybe what, a dozen a year? With most of those coming with a host of preceding problems like addictions and bad choices. The last 3 media-boosted horror stories about women having to flee to another state for their "life-saving care" that I looked into, failed to hold up under scrutiny into the personal details. One was plain old elective with the chick just lying on social media and getting called out by people who knew her. The other two were women who got themselves into a life-risk situation with their fringey and unsupportable medical opinions that put them in risk because they didn't believe in things like well-baby checkups or taking their prenatal vitamins. My advice here is for you to be highly skeptical whenever you hear the claim "I can't get life-saving care because of my state's abortion laws". 99 times out of 100, it's untrue and boosted by the agenda driven. Find me the 10 states with most restrictive laws, and I'll find you their exceptions for rape/incest/life of the mother/viability of the child. - As for poor workers and rich employers, I'll remind you of my earlier comments. You have to identify anywhere in recorded human history where there hasn't been an accumulation of the most by the few. Everywhere. All the time. USSR and their elites with their dachas. Communist China and their supreme leaders with all the power living in golden palaces. The plains Indians right before the colonizers showed up, with their chiefs having all the women and first pick of the best food. Everywhere. All the time. The glory of capitalism and modern conservatism is people have the greatest amount of choice to improve their personal situations through individual effort. Better than socialism. Better than any other -ism. Corruption and evil seeps in everywhere, with every system. Your dreams of some utopia will never, NEVER come to play, because you're dealing with humans, and humans will work in their self-interest, sometimes in evil and horrible and murderous ways, no matter what the system. Capitalism is as fatally flawed as all the rest, but as someone who has lived on food stamps as a child, my life has afforded much more opportunity to gain advantages and resources and privilege than most other places in the world. And so has yours. And so have all the historically marginalized groups with special problems we all hear about. Yes, it's good that an immigrant can use his brain power to build a car and then shoot it into space. And it's good that we have education and job training and endless resources for anyone on food stamps who wants a better life for themselves. That's very, very good. Right?

Me and my buddy learned this lesson 30 years ago when we were new. He loaded up his magazine, thought he was cool and racked one into the chamber and re-loaded the magazine, and we went to the range. He happily counted his 10 rounds and brought in the target to see how he did. Stuck up a new target, pointed his gun at it before sending it back down, saying "and now I'll be a good little gun owner and treat every gun as if it were loaded even though it's a dumb rule because I counted and kno*BLAM*" He had forgotten his cool decision to be cool and carry 11 rounds with his gun that had a 10 round magazine. Blew a head sized hole in the new target. Yeah, best to treat every gun as if it were always loaded. Always imagining the trajectory of an imaginary bullet exiting the thing at any random time. Even if you just reassembled it and are sticking it in your safe - treat it as loaded.

Mine comes from a desire to love thy neighbor and not speak evil of the dead. I suppose practically it comes from a lifetime of witnessing folks hear about the death of someone with opposite politics than them, and watching them spew bile and nastiness and anger and filth at the occasion. I don't ever wanna be like that. Ashamed of the good LDS folks in my life I've heard badmouth people on hearing about their death. It's like dang folks, if Trump is being more Christlike than you are, don't you have some self-reflection to do?

First of all, Happy New Year @Phoenix_person! You're talking to someone who was there to witness the fall of Utah's laws protecting Sundays against corporate interests. I remember local grocer Dan's Foods sending out a tearful letter to all the residences in a 5 mile radius, explaining how sorry they were, but they'd have to start being open on Sunday in order to remain profitable. They promised to not make anyone's kid work on Sunday if they had a religious objection. I was there in the '80's and '90's, as the battle between LDS and non-LDS legislation created some of the most schizophrenic liquor laws in the nation, earning international chuckles. For a few years, certain classes of restaurants could, by law, reserve a percentage of their tables for customers who wanted to drink. The restaurants could charge a "set-up fee": A buck for a glass filled with ice. The patrons would have to bring their own alcohol. I saw several successful waves of reforms getting the church out of the liquor regulation business, and they got exponentially successful after the 2002 Winter Olympics when the entire planet giggled at how hard it was to get a drink in Utah. One of the more recent: "Zion curtain" laws, where bartenders had to be separated by partitions from the consumers of said drinks, fell in 2017. I see Utah's seminary program, where LDS kids get release time during the school day to walk across the street for religious education, is still a thing. Still relying on a 70 yr old SCOTUS case. Seems like populations are shrinking - only 100K Utah high schoolers do seminary during the school day? It used to be all of us. I scoured your paragraph for the evidence supporting your claim that Christian nationalism was on the rise. I saw only your assertions that you can find people on social media who might feel favorably about legislating Christian morality, and you can find threads of racism in their speech, and you figure a bunch of 'em vote for Republicans. As a child, I just assumed it would be best if only Mormons made laws, because we were the only good guys. I grew out of that in my teen years, and I've been watching the notion lose steam in the nation ever since. You find chicks on TikTok who want to be a tradwife but their boyfriend is a racist, and therefore Christian Nationalism is on the rise because the Republicans swept in the last election? Imma need more to be persuaded. I really appreciated (and identified with) your post on focusing on the extremes. I also understand how fringe or extreme things can get normalized into larger populations. But still, conservatism is the notion that good things need to be preserved, and liberalism/progressivism is that stuff needs to be fixed with new solutions. Surely you can see that conservatives are more resistant to such things? I look at the last 5 years of vaccine mandates backed by force, laws enacted that enable males to invade female spaces, laws enabling school counselors to help a kid transition to another gender while keeping it secret from the parents. I look for right-wing analogies to those things, and don't find any. Something might be on the rise, but it isn't Christian Nationalism. Racist extremes on X don't count. Not in a nation where Trump is talking about eliminating the Department of Education for pete's sake.

Can someone give me a definition on what “the extreme right wing“ actually is? I keep hearing it’s authoritarian nationalism, Christian nationalism, fascism, against individual liberty, as well as the usual insults of bigoted/mysogynistic/hate filled, etc. if that’s the case, I honestly don’t see how it has anything to do with republicanism, or right wing principled constitutional conservatism. It certainly can’t be an extension of those things. As I sit here trying to be a good right wing constitutional conservative, and then I ramp my trying up to 10, and I try so hard to become such an extreme radicalized constitutional conservative that little veins on my forehead are popping out, I am moving away from all of that crap, not towards it. The more radical a right wing or I become, the less government I want, the less authority of one human over another. The left is different. The left starts out with vague notions of helping the poor, and a little bit of friendliness towards socialism. Maybe not much of that, but you know, more of what Denmark is doing? And then the more left you become, the more you become interested in things like radical revolutionary change, eliminating and rebuilding institutions. Identity politics, power politics, organizing until you have sufficient strength to force change. The more left you go, the more you become authoritarian and fascist. That’s not true of the right. My anarchist arguing buddy who sees the entire world to the right of him disagrees. But I noticed that Dude has a career and a mortgage and pays taxes, and was actually declaring failure two weeks into Chaz/chop. Unless someone has a good argument to the country, I will stick with what makes sense to me. The “extreme right wing“, is largely a fiction of the left, a title they force upon people who are violently and dangerously opposed to them. The extreme far right doesn’t really have anything to do with the right. Nazis are not right wing. In the 20s and 30s they were born from democratic national socialism. Today’s Nazis don’t have much with them. They are some of @Phoenix_person’s extreme examples, but they are not extreme examples of the right. Right?

I'm pulling heavily from my chilldhood here. I grew up in the 1970's, and whenever I think about those years I'm continually amazed at how racist they appeared compared to our 'enlightened modern sensibilities'. It was everywhere. My nonLDS dad and his Democrat Union buddies with their endless jokes and stories and descriptions. My dad and his WWII vet buddies at the American Legion cookout with their beer and steaks and worries about how "the country is goin' 'ta hell because of all those" n-word people showing up in places they shouldn't. The LDS grown ups and their handwringing about interracial marriage would result in babies with birth defects. The elementary schoolyard and it's endless ignorant evil horribleness. I refuse to go into more specifics because I haven't heard that stuff in decades, and it needs to stay dead. One thing I picked up early, was how any of those groups could be stunned into an ashamed silence by someone outside of the trusted group overhearing it. I was hardly some righteous cultural warrior, just a gullible kid who wanted to make sure I was hearing correctly, so I knew how to say the right things. But I ended up getting every set of eyes in the room locked on me, and I assumed I had done something wrong. When I was with my dad and his friends, I was the mormon kid. When I was with the mormons, I was the son of that beer drinking heathen. When I was with my friend's republican parents, I was that union democrat boy. I learned to keep quiet when people were talking race or woman issues, because whenever I tried to be part of the conversation and say the racist thing I just heard, it was an immediate record-scratch conversation killer. I didn't understand what was happening until decades of hindsight. It was endemic, and it perpetuated in secret, with trusted friends. Say it out loud in the sunlight, where people could hear, and the notions scattered like cockroaches. Real, actual racism, where you just assume your color makes you better than another color, can only exist in circles of people who think they are good people, until someone outside of the circle notices. Then it withers and dies. I can only imagine what some of the good Christians of smalltown Midwest America felt when one of theirs, a born-again peanut farmer, became president and started talking openly about how racial discrimination is wrong and evil. Absolutely there would be people who felt personally called-out and swiftly changed their tune.

At it's most basic, the definition of 'conspiracy' is two or more people planning things in secret that will influence others. So if you and I communicate in Facebook messenger to play a prank on LDSGator, we would be co-conspirators engaging in a conspiracy. So from that definition and perspective, there are conspiracies and conspirators everywhere. The word doesn't deserve the weight we give it. If you've watched the Hamilton musical, it portrays the birth of our elected officials learning to conspire when Hamilton meets with his political adversaries Madison and Jefferson behind closed doors to reach a deal and ensure each other's votes on things. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WySzEXKUSZw. And from that perspective, everything every official or policymaker or lobbyist does is a conspiracy unless there's some sort of record made of the conversation or proceedings. That said, I'm pretty sure there are plenty of large/powerful people and groups out there, conspiring with each other in ways that will harm me and mine, and help them and theirs. The goal is usually to help them and theirs, while the harm is optional and not always a thing. One eye opening one was the Russian use of twitter bots to forward and boost antivax narratives on western nations. Sounds like a story a conspiracy nut would make up, right? https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-45294192 https://gwtoday.gwu.edu/russian-trolls-bots-influence-vaccine-discussion-twitter So yeah, nations try to manipulate the culture and affairs of other nations. And nonstate actors get together to do the same. And yeah, we all knew in Colorado that limp and unimpressive John Hickenlooper would be a name we heard for decades. Because as his lackluster governorship ended, he got on someone's private jet and flown off to Montreaux Switzerland to meet with the Bilderbergers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bilderberg_Meeting#Conspiracy_theories Subscribe to my newsletter for more of the truth they don't want you to hear!

Just reading what folks are remembering about him, apparently he did quite a bit to diminish the notion that Southern Christians and racism went hand in hand. I can't tell whether it's because folks saw him speaking out against racism and realizing southern Christians aren't so racist, or if he actually managed to help decrease the amount of racism in southern Christianity. I have some early childhood memories of Carter. I knew my parents and neighbors liked him and everyone at church and school didn't like him.

The '70's were the golden age of understanding what Democrat leadership got you. The term "stagflation" got coined, as we had both 15% inflation and decreasing GDP. Years of US hostages staying hostages. Malaise. But like Gator said, Jimmy Carter seemed to redeem himself outside of the presidency. Overseeing free elections in troubled nations and many other things. And how many famous people can we name who retire back to their home town to teach sunday school at a small parish? Well, one. RIP Jimmy Carter.

This is the app that contains the new hymns. And other things to apparently. Has anyone listened to these playlists?

The notion of "I've done x and y, that's good enough. The z I did shouldn't matter because of the x and y" is a red flag, depending on the severity of the z.

Yeah...no. In 2016, the whole noise from the entire left was a coronation of Queen Hillary as The Woman Who Shattered The Glass Ceiling. I can only contribute an anecdote. So to make sure the 3 of us are talking the same language: The bell curve of non-right political thought looked like this in 2016: At the top of the bell curve are the center left folks and democrats. Moving down the bell curve are the liberals. The remaining 20% are mostly progressives. The far far left end of things, the tail of the bell curve, the last 1-2% are leftists, marxists, communists. Yeah? I mean here in 2024 that bell curve has been flattening out on the left end of things, and that extreme far end has maybe grown to 5-15%. But in 2016 that's what I was seeing. And yes, those first 3 standard deviations of left-leaning folks were all singing Hillary's praises. But the tail of the bell curve existed, and you could find anti-Hillary voices in their small numbers. Anyway, my anarchist buddy from high school and I were facebook arguing buddies in '16. Dude and PP have a lot in common, with the interest in community organizing, and when both of 'em walk down the street, from their perspective the entire world walks to the right of them. My buddy co-authored the anarchist.faq back in high school. You can still find it online. Dude was expressing loathing for Hillary and the establishment democrats since before her campaign for president. And when I'd go into his facebook areas, his fellow 1-2% hard-core lefties were all expressing the same hatred. It was revolutionary talk, absolutely in the minority of left-of-center politics, but it was there. Fast forward 8 years, and it's increasingly common to find leftists hating on democrats. But it's been a thing that has been growing for a while. (As a fun last thing, Facebook told me that both Vort and my anarchist buddy lived in the same city for a while. For years I've been entertained with the thought that they pass each other on the street daily, or might even be vaguely acquainted with each other in a way that has them never knowing anything about the other's politics.)

I'd like to suggest you give mormondialogue.org a try. They welcome debate and criticism.

Huh. I always knew you were a fating a father of 11, but I'm blown away at learning are also bein6 a orthoderic masse on!

Forgive the bad paraphrase of Robert Burns' poem "To a Louse", but I think Elon just gave X users this power. If you have an X account, open the app, go to Grok, and have it draw a picture of you. It'll look through your X/Twitter posts, and come up with 4 guesses. My X account is basically used to argue and post snarky comments, so I was glad to see this:

*sigh* We might start handing out bans instead of just closing threads. Site rules 3 and 4: 3. Personal attacks, name calling, flaming, and judgments against other members will not be tolerated. 4. No bickering and nit-picking toward others. Realize that sometimes it is very difficult to be able to express how one feels through written words. Please be courteous and ask for a further explanation, rather then trying to attack and find holes in someone else's post.