I'm an atheist and will always be one of the first in line to suggest that religions should be subject to criticism and the rule of law just like any other organization.

That being said, I'm not entirely comfortable with the idea that congregations are complicit in the misdeeds of the institution itself, whether or not they are aware of verified instances of misdeeds. ...Pretty slippery slope.

Expand that to, say, nations. In the history of the US, the government has committed some pretty indefensible atrocities. Genocide, mass relocation, and other offenses against Native Americans in the name of "manifest destiny". Enslavement of a race of people based on skin color, with disenfranchisement and continued abuse well after slavery was abolished, with elements that certainly persist to this day. Funding and supplying extremist organizations because they happen to have a short-term enemy that coincides with ours, which frequently comes back to bite us in the ass later. Using underhanded tricks including false-flag operations to justify wars and other offensive actions. Attempting to assassinate democratically elected leaders of foreign governments. And on and on.

Are all US citizens complicit in those misdeeds, merely by an accident of birth? But those things were in the past, you might argue. Given the depth of dirt you can find on our past with a little digging, I'd say it is reasonable to expect that there's things that the government is doing now that we may or may not be aware of that would be similarly difficult to defend.

Many/most Catholics can either remain intentionally blissfully ignorant about these problems, or will be able to go to great lengths to rationalize their way around them. Just like most US citizens don't lose much sleep over our government's past and present misdeeds. In either case, indoctrination puts the blinders on -- and can be incredibly difficult to escape.

For the religious, "love the sinner, hate the sin" is an oft-repeated phrase. As an atheist outraged by these scandals and the decades/centuries of intentional cover-ups by the Church itself, I might be tempted to turn that on its head. "Accept the religious, hate the religion." By all means, be outraged towards the institution itself. By all means, fight to end the protections that have allowed this kind of abuse to go unchecked. But perhaps try to keep some (Christian?) empathy for the average Catholic congregation members who have been brainwashedindoctrinated their whole lives and are likely in too deep to escape. Reserve that hatred for the clergy that abused their positions of power and control to commit these crimes, and the organizational system that systematically allowed it to happen while covering it up. They deserve every bit of hate you throw their way.

I'm not sure how I feel about the anime eyes on Alita, and I don't know the source material(s) enough to judge how close it looks to the original(s). It looks like they are aiming to be based off the manga more than the anime adaptations of the manga, which puts me even more out of my element.

jesus.... how do they keep fucking this up?

I'm a 40-year-old guy who grew up on DC comics. I have a shelf full of them. There are one or two Marvel titles, but really they were never my thing.

And yet, I've seen nearly every MCU movie and only 2 DCU movies, and only one I actually enjoyed.

FFS WB, this isn't that hard. It's not even like you haven't done it before... just animated.

Batman animated, Justice League, Teen Titans... they all had elements of the "dark and gritty" but they were fun! They certainly weren't an absolute clusterfuck like this nonsense.

Just stop. Please... just give it a rest.

Give it to the animated dept, or the guys who made the Arkham games, anyone but the muppets in charge of this shitshow.

"Fracture a society, it seems, and the most nefarious (and well armed) actors often rise to the top: militiamen, criminal elements, ((Religious)) and sociopaths of various stripes."

Describes america and the rise of the right wing perfectly.

Not to be pedantic, but I know enough people who've claimed money has "nothing to do with happiness" literally that I have to counter it.

If you lack the money to keep you, or even more your children nourished or protected from the elements, you will discover there are many reasons for unhappiness that money can aid with. Money in no way grants or guarantees happiness, but there are a lot of things that make you miserable and sad that money can overcome, hungry and homeless children being the most obvious.

I wasn't raised in the church nor did anyone ever tell me about the Lord. I came to believe in God and Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior entirely by personal revelation.

The information bubble that he talks about equally applies to secular society. Many elements of our society, be it entertainment, media, or education all point to the secular creation story. Watch basically any nature video and you'll see the indoctrination "blah blah evolution blah blah deep time blah blah deep time blah blah evolution" etc

I never had a Christian or spiritual friend, my friends and family all believed what I did. That wasn't by design since no one ever brought up God or spiritual beliefs to me. There was zero information coming into my life about God.

I developed an arrogance towards believers although I was incredibly ignorant about what they believed. I had cherry picked a few bible verses which I thought disproved their religion, and that's about all I had.

The majority of unbelievers are in the position I was in. I would have gone that way forever if God hadn't revealed Himself to me.

This video is partly true, as beliefs can develop in a bubble. Then it brings up the "truth" as the antidote, yet what is the truth according to the creators? They failed to define what it is, only that it wouldn't be a belief in God, with no proof for that at all. True believers in the secular story don't see that as faith, because of the indoctrination, ironically

Pretty good video. Specific things:

Too many prostitutes: Most of the non-Thai people that complain about this went to the wrong places in Thailand. Pattaya was a tiny fishing village before the Vietnam war. Then, soldiers started getting shipped into the country for R&R. The Thai government didn't really know what to do with them, so they sorta passed the buck and decided to send them to Pattaya to relax. Bunch of stressed out dudes there, nothing to do, high demand for alternate activities ... the market answered.

Fast forward to today, and Pattaya knows exactly what put it on the map. I hate that place -- it is like what would happen if you took the worst/sleaziest elements of Vegas and Tijuana, and then built a "city" around it. Shittiest beach in Thailand, chock full of sleaze, disgusting. However, it is one of the most major tourist destinations. Gee, why could that be? Is it in spite of the nature of the place, or because of it? No false advertising here, you know what you're getting when you book a trip there. And if that is your thing, more power to ya.

Now, I don't want to act like prostitution exists in Pattaya and Soi Cowboy / Patpong in Bangkok, and is absent elsewhere. Far from it. Every town, down on to tiny ones, likely has a red-light district and brothels. The ones you hear about are sex tourism pits like those major ones, but the trade is alive and well pretty much everywhere -- and mostly caters to local Thais.

I've honestly never been to such an establishment or sought those services (in 11 years of being here), but I don't care that they are available. The most significant negative is that they are NOT well-regulated like, say, what I've heard about Amsterdam. Prostitution is technically illegal in Thailand. So the de-facto situation is that brothels have to pay protection money to police in order to avoid getting shut down or "inspected", etc.

Corruption is a major problem -- much worse than prostitution, in my opinion.


Too many ladyboys: It is certainly true that there are more trans people per capita here than pretty much anywhere else that I know of. It took me a while, being a country kid from Kansas, but I see that in pretty much the same light as the German narrator in the video at this point. Acceptance is good. You do you, man.

As a stereotype on the flip side of the coin, I think the ladyboys tend to be great in custom interaction kinds of jobs. Cashiers at 7-11, waitpeople at restaurants, etc. Polite, attentive, helpful. And often the most willing to attempt to use English. A lot of the best students that I've taught English to have been ladyboy leaning.


Freedom: I'm with @Mordhaus here. When your personal liberty is mainly due to the apathy / incompetence of the governing authority, and they may choose to get off their asses and revoke that at any time ... perhaps it isn't something to brag about. Very basic stuff like dissenting speech and protesting is met with being carted off for little re-education chats, etc. Pretty scary shit, actually.


Basically I tend to think that just like anywhere on Earth, there's a lot of good here and plenty of bad too. There's plenty of legitimate gripes with cultural elements and stuff in Thailand, but the most common ones (that the video pretty accurately listed) are pretty insignificant in my opinion.

I like that they worked in some of the elements of the original pip-boy into this one. The vacuum tubes and red buttons are a nice touch.

The last comment about 'be a nice guy' is interesting.

I was listening to Joe Rogan Experience, and they mentioned something about how the genesis of the 'woman hater' is actually the forever-friend-zoned-nice-guy who gets so fed up with being 'taken for granted'/'shot down' that his niceness turns into hatred

It made sense to me. Essentially, the woman hater is what becomes of a boring nice guy who lacked the patience/endurance to wait for women his age to make their way through all the exciting unreliable men before being satiated (or just getting too old to fetch the interesting men's attention) and finally settling for the nice guy that was boringly always available.



And I get it. It plays into the human natural value system, where things that are scarce are more valuable.

The ahole is fleeting. You can't always have him, and if you do you can't hold him, so he has an element of scarcity, which creates value.

The nice guy will reliably stick around if you go with him, so he is less scarce, so he is less valuable. The lower value in turn makes him more likely to be single and always available, further reducing his scarcity, and further devaluing him, and further increasing his chances of being single. A feedback loop.

I suppose that there is also a 3rd path - the element of nice guys that just stop giving a crap before turning into haters, which makes them more scarce, which actually finally gets them attention, and they stop being single.

(And a 4th path - nice guy finds 'a girl who wants a nice guy from the start'. In my observation this isn't the typical case.)



Cases like this (forever alone nice guy, not specifically Mr Van Driver) are when I think 'arrangement' web sites create a good solution. The guys get to not be lonely anymore, and the women gets taken care of. Kind of plays into the nice guy natural instinct, too.

Amusingly, 'arrangement' may be a better fit for the forever-alone nice guys than 'waiting it out'.
In both cases (waiting vs arrangement) the women are mainly after stability/support.
The older women 'nice guy' matches with by 'waiting it out' would not have picked 'nice guy' if they still had the looks to keep pulling exciting men.
So, if you're gonna be with someone because they want you for support, why not just go with a younger woman and be up front about the situation. If it doesn't work out, either party can walk away. No messy divorce. Seems like a safer and more practical option.

(Not picking on older women, just observing that : as people get older, the single scene becomes more and more 'leftovers' that are 'left over for a good reason'. The odds of finding anyone worth while diminish with time, because the highest quality individuals get retained first. Wait long enough, and you're left with over the hill jaded pragmatists who once may have had looks but now have nothing left to offer. At which point, both 'arrangement' and 'being single' are legitimately better options.)



Regarding Mr. Van Guy specifically, I'm not sure if he had a chance. He had some social anxiety that made him unable to talk to people. So he was likely not gonna get a partner naturally, and was unlikely to succeed among professional peers well enough to get the financial security necessary to be some sugar daddy.

So, yeah, dude was likely a romantic dead end. Possibly even the same mental (brain developmental?) issues that made him unable to talk to people also made him susceptible to getting the sort of crazy tilted that allowed him to run people over. The dude could have actually been fated (circumstantially) to end up in tragedy. Just speculating, wouldn't shock me.

-scheherazade

It still isn't sci-fi. There are no sci-fi elements here at all.

Glad to hear you stating things as you did, I largely agree with you.

The trick playing out in Canada now is that because we've expanded the definition of protected classes more quickly than the US, the protected classes rights are interfering more and more.

I do not believe that religion should be a protected class in the same way as race, gender or ethnicity. Similarly sexual orientation and gender identity shouldn't be either. Race, Gender and ethnicity are all assigned at birth and can largely be determined by blood test and demonstrated to be something entirely outside an individuals control, choice and behaviour.

Religion is the most easily demonstrated as deserving a different status of protection than the others in that most religions ALL hold the others as heretical. Declaring other faiths immoral is necessary to religious freedom and I take as the very positive basis of America's freedom of religion notion being a wonderful agreement between Catholics and Protestants to agree to disagree over war.

More controversially, I would also class your sexual preferences and identity in with religion as a different degree of protected class. There is an element of behaviour and choice here that can not be determined at birth with any manner of blood test or parental bloodline.

More simply, the right to discriminate should not exist for immutable things people are born to and remain beyond their choice or control, while the right to discriminate based upon behaviours is entirely necessary and important. If you want to believe Scientology can help you heal broken limbs and transcend the world your free to it, but I'm gonna treat you differently than a sane person. To similarly treat someone different based upon race or gender though is unacceptable.

Like any extremist philosophy Rand's writings contain elements of truth. The problem is that they offer a philosophical fig leaf for the rich and powerful to fully exploit their situation in business and politics without regard to the negative effects they may have on the rest of society.

A successful civilisation needs to understand the limitations of both sides of the argument and take the best of both worlds.

Says you. ;-)
I've always been entertained by kaiju movies (until sci-fi channel got involved), in large part because of the terrible dialog and dubbing, but also the dead pan seriousness. When they have tried to be silly, like Godzilla Jr, it always fell flat for me.
As for kung fu, I feel that the bad dialogue adds a needed comedy element often otherwise missing. I thought Kung Pow was hilarious and inventive because of intentionally terrible dubbing.

I do agree, this bastardization has some glaring issues...that doesn't mean it can't still be fun.

Those can be blocked by adding the following filters to your ad blocker (i.e. uBlock):

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I agree with the work thing, I'd be leery of getting involved with anyone I worked with. And while it's possible they could be doing it wrong, it's also just as possible that the other party is in fact overreacting.
I also think that the more radical elements of feminism have spent so much time flogging the idea that all men are sex crazed lunatics and rape culture to generate fear (just like the far right does with immigrants and terrorism). So that any solution no matter how extreme will become acceptable to the masses.