Amezarak

5 ms·

31.
by Amezarak 3mo ago
The Talmud is not contemporary. Not only that the identification with that figure as the Jesus is highly contested.
32.
by Amezarak 3mo ago
> Quite similar to Romulus. Yes, Joseph Smith played a similar role to Romulus in the founding of Rome: the leader and lawgiver. It's the Joseph Smith of Rome you are wishing away, not Moroni. It also seems highly unlikely that Smit
33.
by Amezarak 3mo ago
> Also we do know there were many competing narratives describing the life of Christ just a few hundred years after he died. There were meaningful competing theologies , there were not meaningfully different competing narratives of the
34.
by Amezarak 3mo ago
> Moses and exodus are completely counterfactual I don't see anything particularly counterfactual or unlikely about a group of Egyptian or Caananite-descended Egyptians leaving Egypt and returning to Caanaan, where they fused with a
35.
by Amezarak 3mo ago
> It's exactly how Romans changed from their Roman worship to christianity. The conversion of the Romans to Christianity happened because of real events, even if elements of the stories became mythologized. Or are you saying there
36.
by Amezarak 3mo ago
There’s no evidence it was done “all the time”; the most logical explanation is that all these figures were based on real people, even if their exploits and histories were exaggerated and mythologized over time, just as we see with figures
37.
by Amezarak 3mo ago
> what the motivations might have been to create such a myth. These are almost always absurdly simplistic, when they're not simply projections of how modern peoples think and what motivates them. It's really not useful to spe
38.
by Amezarak 3mo ago
> What's the corroborating evidence from ~750BC documenting their existence? Heck, where's that evidence from 650BC? This is a totally unfruitful line of inquiry, unless you are an academic historian doomed to publish-or-perish
39.
by Amezarak 3mo ago
Or perhaps its because infanticide via exposure was a very common and widespread practice for most of human history. Either way, there's a large gulf between "Romulus and Remus weren't real" and "Romulus and Remus w
40.
by Amezarak 3mo ago
Denying the possible, even likely, historicity of Romulus and Remus is silly, yes.
41.
by Amezarak 3mo ago
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a7/Census-2... Large numbers of people report their ancestry simply as "American." I would actually argue this is the origin of a lot of politic
42.
by Amezarak 3mo ago
The US did undergo ethnogenesis; particularly in the southeast, there have long been large numbers of people that identify their ethnicity as "American." The process was largely disrupted/reversed in the northeast with the El
43.
by Amezarak 3mo ago
What do they do during thunderstorms?
44.
by Amezarak 3mo ago
I don't know how to make it any clearer that my comment was a response to: > Iran changed the game with their missile and drone defense ability forever I think. Not an invitation for discussion on the vagaries on the larger strategy
45.
by Amezarak 3mo ago
US forces performed better than people have been saying they would for decades against drones and anti-ship missile, and their defense tech performed better than what we’ve seen in prior wars with similar matchups. You and the other comment
46.
by Amezarak 3mo ago
1. We’re not arguing about the strategic outcome of the war, which different people interpret in totally opposite ways based on their party affiliation. 2. The USN fired thousands of missiles at the Iranians so obviously they were highly m
47.
by Amezarak 3mo ago
Not just carriers, they couldn’t even hit US Navy destroyers transiting the strait with massed attacks. E.g. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/2-us-navy-destroyers-transit-st... Accurate long-range attacks are not new. If a
48.
by Amezarak 3mo ago
How many US ships did the Iranians hit? Ed: The answer suggests to me this is highly overblown in combination with the total number of US military casualties from missile and drone attacks (7). It makes “obliteration” of bases sound like ex
49.
by Amezarak 4mo ago
According to the BLS, 10x more people are employed in the manufacturing sector than the information sector, and average hourly pay is $36/hr. What are you talking about? Manufacturing employment was also much higher in the 1980s and 19
50.
by Amezarak 4mo ago
> The rest of the world settled on putting the center of technology and arts and media and finance in the US, to hugely lucrative benefits for the US, with liberal free trade and IP protections and patent monopolies and a very healthy pr
51.
by Amezarak 4mo ago
Well, that’s what I’m getting at. There’s no reason I can’t go to the store every day - I pass right by a lot of grocery stores. I don’t want to go in them or even think about buying stuff any more than I have to - it’s tedious. I want to a
52.
by Amezarak 4mo ago
> to take back to their oversized fridges and storage basements. It's really awesome to have plenty of food storage, with extra and oversized refrigerators, and a deep freeze too. I keep mine full of vegetables and beef - I have a w
53.
by Amezarak 4mo ago
> Because they absolutely have. Wait till your kid has instragram and snapchat and WhatsApp and they can talk to random adults Why would they be allowed or even able to download Snapchat or WhatsApp if this is a concern? > Wait till t
54.
by Amezarak 4mo ago
I don’t think it’s left vs right but establishment vs “populist”.
55.
by Amezarak 4mo ago
> This has been true ever since the creation of the internet and web. It's true that some have always seen it this way, but it's become much more salient in the current political context. The average politician 30 years ago was
56.
by Amezarak 4mo ago
I've yet to meet an ordinary person who supports any of this, though they might agree if vaguely prompted about it without detail. They certainly aren't lobbying their politicians about it. This is top down, not bottom up. > So
57.
by Amezarak 4mo ago
No, I have no problem with OP's arbitrary lines - they are meaningful even though reality necessitates any such lines of this type (categorizing individuals) be drawn arbitrarily. What I have a problem with is people moralizing about s
58.
by Amezarak 4mo ago
Virtually nobody really uses that definition of species because it’s totally untenable in practice - you’d put every species of wolf, dog, and coyote in the same bucket, for a simple example, but it gets much worse than this. Ligers are som
59.
by Amezarak 4mo ago
Nope, not only is that not the definition of species, it’s not even true in the case you mention - mules are sometimes fertile.
60.
by Amezarak 4mo ago
This is a silly argument. Biology is inherently messy and “ethnicity” is just a fuzzy clustering. You can make the exact same argument about “species” - because that too is a human abstraction that breaks down in biological reality because

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