Sorry.

I'm calling him pathetic because he gave two pro choice arguments believing they are anti choice arguments.

I don't believe a thing that breaths liquid is a human being. A child, imo, must have taken a breath to be a living human child. Until then, it's only a potential human requiring an actual human to be it's life support system and sustenance. That's worse than any other form of slavery.

I'm so pro choice, I support 7th trimester abortions, like Spartans. In ancient Greece, it wasn't a human until it was a year old, and killing it wasn't murder until then.

At 6 weeks, it's indistinguishable from a chicken or newt, so not a human. It must evolve completely before I grant it that status. Until live birth, it's just a parasite.

My kind of bullfighting.
This sport dates back to ancient Greece or earlier, as depicted in frescoes and other artwork found in Knossos, Crete and elsewhere
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bull-leaping

*promote

Man, I'm suuuper late to this party....
Anyways, Die Hard is and is not a Christmas movie at the same time. And it depends on your definition what makes a Christmas movie.
I'm gonna take an insane detour here that'll make sense.
Is Star Wars Episode 4 a science fiction movie?
That setting is futuristic, sure, must be sci-fi then. Lasers, Spaceships, Robots, the works. The checklist is done. Sci-Fi.
But what are the themes it touches upon, what is the story?
A young farmer's boy (naturally an adoptred orphan) named Luke is dragged into a rebellion against an evil king (Palpatine) by accident. When the boy get's hold of a pretty princess' (RIP Carrie Fisher) message to an old ally and menthor (Obi) through the fault of her two comic-relief servants (Robot-slaves), he decides to seek the adventure he's yearning for. He finds the old man (by fucking up) and both seek the next harbor to board a ship to join the resistance. The hire smuggler/pirate/bandit/nerfherder Han and his foreign friend Chewie and cross paths with the black knight Lord Vader, the evil kings enforcer. Hijinks ensue, princess rescued, the magic castle/ship/train of the evil king get's destroyed and everyone gets a medal.
What's exactly sci-fi here?
That could play out in medieval times. Or ancient greece. Or the wild west. Or on Christmas.
The setting and the genre are two different things and both determine what you'll label a story with.
Alien is a horror movie, a slasher. Aliens is a war movie. Alien³ is a horror movie of the animal-gone-maneater kind. Alien: Resurrection is a disaster movie (hihi).
They're all sci-fi, like Star Wars. Because of the setting.
Now look at Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 2 Episode 9 'The Measure Of A Man'.
Lasers, spaceships, robots, the usual. What is it about?
A Robot who's so sophisticated that he has to go to trial to prove he's not property but a real boy. Sure, you'll say, I've seen Pinocchio and I can see african men argue the same stuff in the 18th century. The point of the story is not only that is humanity is questioned, the point is he's an artificial lifeform. The question is not only 'What makes you a person?' but also 'When does artificial intelligence become an artificial person?'
That shit won't work in a setting without spaceships and robots. That's sci-fi because of its story.
So, setting and story are both what makes you label a movie a certain way but they're not the same.
Die Hard. Happens on Christmas. Could be Thanksgiving too. Setting interchangeable.
Story? Doesn't contain any christmas-related themes beyond two estranged family members become closer again. That could happen at a funeral as well.
I'm in my mid-thirties and I love Die Hard. It's one of the best 80's action movies. I can watch it anytime and I've seen it at least 20 times (noit joking here). But mostly in the summer. But I understand the question and its diverse answers perfectly well.
Die Hard is a christmas movie if it feels like one to you. For me, Lord of the Rings (especially Fellowship) feels like a Christmas movie to me. I've seen them all in theatres in December, I watched them on VHS and Blu-Ray only in December so far. They have fuck all to do with the occasion but this year was the first one I didn't watch any of them in December. And I feel I missed something this year. I'm not sure I can watch them at this time of the year.

You've bought the bullshit.
We are not the only omnivore. Many animals that can survive without meat eat it. They have a choice, they choose meat. All dogs for instance.
You make the mistake of assuming all meat was 'harmed' because it didn't die a natural death. Simply not true.
Yes, it can be wrong to violently kill animals for entertainment, but not wrong to humanely kill them for sustenance.
Sure we fornicate in public. You've never been to Key West, obviously.
Do we kill our newborn children, no, we advanced enough to 'kill' them before they're born so they are never children, but before abortion, yes, humans absolutely killed their newborn children. In ancient Greece, a child wasn't considered a human until it was a year old, and killing it for any reason in that time was perfectly acceptable. In many cultures, if a child is deformed, it's killed, even today. You're just plain wrong.
A LARGE percentage of animals eat meat, not a small one.
Again, you make a mistaken ASSUMPTION that I (and everyone else) eat factory meat, because otherwise your argument falls flat.

What say you about the Masai, who have nothing to eat besides their cattle and live a symbiotic life with them?

There is something innately fascinating in finding technical, biological and economical explanations of historical developments, and it's definitely so much more satisfying than having to resort to nationalism, racism, or religion to explain one region or another's successes.

The risk, I guess, in treating human history as a set of engineering problems, is that the human mind is so attuned to finding cause and effect that it might make us a little blind to situations where the answer is actually more blind chance than anything else.

One of my favorite of these explanations is when China's 'failure' to colonize the world is attributed to the success of porcelain: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0OhXxx7cQg

It seems almost too neat to be true - like the false etymology of Marie est malade - so does anyone know if there are scholars who poke holes in the Porcelain vs Glass explanation?

Edit: Improving my googling shows that this explanation remains reasonable but still also involves a bit of blind historical chance. Colored glass was available in ancient Greece, and the Romans and Egyptians used manganese oxide to decolor it, which led to transparent glass and the basis for lens-grinding... that decolorization process apparently didn't pass on to China or wasn't valued by their culture, perhaps due to the clear competitive advantages of porcelain.

> "dividing large jurisdictions into many smaller jurisdictions would be a drain on commerce"

I don't think this is necessarily so. Both ancient Greece and Renaissance Italy prospered due to multiplicity of competing city-states. The more the competition between states, the more they will have to lower taxes and make the environment business-friendly. It creates a meritocracy as those states that fail to attract "clients," citizens and businesses will not survive. Small states make it very easy to do business with them, as in for example, Singapore, Lichtenstein, Monaco, Bahamas, etc. Small jurisdictions adapt their laws to make it easy to do business with them from abroad. Only big ones, like the US, make it a hassle to deal with from outside the country.

A free market society is as close to a meritocracy as you can get.

In a free market you can only really do well by providing goods and services that others want.

A common legal framework comes from commonality of culture, not from state control. And cultures adapt to each other for purposes of commerce.

Let commerce operate freely and people will find a way to adapt legal protections for successful and peaceful commerce. A small jurisdiction that "rips off" foreign business partners will find itself very quickly with no business partners and.being small, have a hard time surviving. Out of self preservation they will want to be trustworthy for others to want to do commerce with them.

Uhhh, now this phenom you imagine (enhance life for fellow man, yadda-yadda) has de-evolved into what we see worldwide: An unending fabrication of laws which restrict or inhibit the will of your fellow man in order to enable and strengthen the the will of a small percentage of human beings who use humanity to their own ends.

Comparing slavery in America to slavery of the bible is fucking ignorant. Never has there been slavery as cruel and inhumane and fueled by denial and lies than here. To compare U.S. slavery to that of the slaves in ancient Greece or Rome, both cultures whose slaves were an integral class in these cultures, is an historical faux pas of ludicrous proportions.

It should be pointed out that the richest in America and those who benefited hugely from the bailout can't even be found on census data. You have to do A LOT of study to actually find out they exist, it's something like 1% of the top 1%. They have serious influence, and benefit from a crooked system.

Also for the broader point of inequality. The point of the battle against it is because those on the lesser side have been being hammered for following the rules. You work and work for years with the idea that you'll get ahead, and that's taken away from you. This is how the Tea Party came about, their grievances are legitimate before they were sort of taken away from them by more powerful interests.

The point is, democracy suffers hugely when you have inequality. Ancient Greece (Aristotle) had the idea to fix this is by making the society more equal, therefore you wouldn't have the poor using their power of numbers to subvert democracy against the rich. America had a similar problem in the early days, instead of working towards equality, they worked towards stifling democracy. By putting most of the power in the hands of the wealthy Senate, it made sure that democracy wouldn't get out of hand and the rich white guys can keep what they stole.

Look this isn't something that's right or left. The right and the left are together on this, we don't like tyrannical powers trying to control us. A corporation with it's top down infrastructure is the basic definition of tyrannical. Add that to the fact that corporations dictate how our democracy is run, you have a system that isn't functioning and needs to be fixed.

Our Democracy isn't functional, it needs to be taken down and replaced.

>> ^HadouKen24:

Interesting.
It doesn't make much mention of Hermetic Qabalah, though. It briefly mentions that the texts reached scholars who used it to interpret ancient Greek writings. This interpretation of the Kabbalah was eventually also fused with the grimoire traditions (which also contained practices preserved from ancient Greece, along with Christian and Muslim elements), to the extent that after the 16th century, nearly all serious magicians also studied Kabbalah. And this continued on for several centuries.
The version used by practicing occultists--who usually spell the tradition as Qabalah or Qabbalah--was refined and popularized during the occult revival of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Alongside the occult revival, and with many overlapping figures, was a revival of Paganism and a general rejection of Christianity. These twin movements sort of bubbled along under the surface until the 60s and 70s, when they started gaining steam. And with the rise of the internet in the 90s, as access to the ideas grew, the movements exploded.
With the rather curious result that there are now thousands of self-professed Pagans and occultists who, with no affiliation with Christianity or Judaism at all, nonetheless study the Zohar and the Sepher Yetzirah with a great deal of energy. Naturally, the traditions one finds among these communities differ substantially from Kabbalah as practiced by Jewish adherents.


excellent synopsis!

Interesting.

It doesn't make much mention of Hermetic Qabalah, though. It briefly mentions that the texts reached scholars who used it to interpret ancient Greek writings. This interpretation of the Kabbalah was eventually also fused with the grimoire traditions (which also contained practices preserved from ancient Greece, along with Christian and Muslim elements), to the extent that after the 16th century, nearly all serious magicians also studied Kabbalah. And this continued on for several centuries.

The version used by practicing occultists--who usually spell the tradition as Qabalah or Qabbalah--was refined and popularized during the occult revival of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Alongside the occult revival, and with many overlapping figures, was a revival of Paganism and a general rejection of Christianity. These twin movements sort of bubbled along under the surface until the 60s and 70s, when they started gaining steam. And with the rise of the internet in the 90s, as access to the ideas grew, the movements exploded.

With the rather curious result that there are now thousands of self-professed Pagans and occultists who, with no affiliation with Christianity or Judaism at all, nonetheless study the Zohar and the Sepher Yetzirah with a great deal of energy. Naturally, the traditions one finds among these communities differ substantially from Kabbalah as practiced by Jewish adherents.

So I guess I should just ask point blank, are you saying that my overall premise is wrong, and that there is no such thing as "idle rich"?

And just to make myself explicit, where I was really gonna go with the argument was that there's a fundamental problem with castigating "idleness" and valorizing "work", especially if your definition of "idle" is "not receiving any income" and "work" as "receiving income from any source".

Paris Hilton is an awesome springboard from the usual "welfare queens vs. captains of industry" conversation into something a little more grounded in reality, since both welfare queens and captains of industry are just figments of our imagination. The real people we lump into those categories never live up to those caricatures.

In reply to this comment by oritteropo:
No, and in fact the people I can think of who lived off their inheritances tend to have done something notable as well, or I probably wouldn't have heard of them (like the impressionist painter Paul Cezanne).

When I tried a google search for more candidates, the first hit was from ancient Greece! Apollodorus, son of Pasion the slave...
In reply to this comment by NetRunner:
Do you have a better example in mind? I mostly use her as my go-to example because she's a name people will recognize, associate with being ridiculously rich, has a reputation for having a crap work ethic, and a reputation for being completely out of touch with how normal people live.

I have more nuanced reasons for picking her as well, but that's really more of a springboard into a discussion about what "work ethic" really means...

No, and in fact the people I can think of who lived off their inheritances tend to have done something notable as well, or I probably wouldn't have heard of them (like the impressionist painter Paul Cezanne).

When I tried a google search for more candidates, the first hit was from ancient Greece! Apollodorus, son of Pasion the slave...
In reply to this comment by NetRunner:
Do you have a better example in mind? I mostly use her as my go-to example because she's a name people will recognize, associate with being ridiculously rich, has a reputation for having a crap work ethic, and a reputation for being completely out of touch with how normal people live.

I have more nuanced reasons for picking her as well, but that's really more of a springboard into a discussion about what "work ethic" really means...

>> ^dystopianfuturetoday:

A timeless cat video featuring a an adorable little furball struggling with it's own super-ego. It would be just as entertaining in ancient Greece or on a Mars mining colony in the late 37th century.


"It's a KITTEN, dipshit."

A timeless cat video featuring a an adorable little furball struggling with it's own super-ego. It would be just as entertaining in ancient Greece or on a Mars mining colony in the late 37th century.

>> ^Lawdeedaw:

>> ^A10anis:
Pastor says; "it's indoctrination, children are in their formative years, and you start introducing sexuality into their young impressionable minds, you start changing our culture." Oh, unlike the indoctrination of their young impressionable minds into dogmatic, medieval, religion which, if not stopped, will END our culture.

Um, you do realize religion IS culture? It is a universal of all cultures--just like money and government and mental illness (1/4 of everyone...) You could say it is in our genes and we must unlearn it... Now, the different types of religions is something to debate...
But let's talk about why homosexuality has a bad rap... Homosexuality itself got a very bad rap because of one little nation that practiced it religiously... Rome... Rome was one big, gay death machine that the world hated so much that it now shuns even the good practices of the Empire. Think of the Middle East, nations that particularly had problems with Rome...yup, they really hate gay and lesbians...
Funny that Christianity became popular in Rome when those crimes were happening...ironic or just cause-and-effect...


Wrroonngg!

Roman society looked down on homosexuals.

They were seen as shameful and mostly had to hide themselves. The dictator Sula was most likely homosexual. Even though he had complete power over the Roman state he hid his sexuality until after he stepped down from power.

Ancient Greece on the other hand...