I was surprised myself!

The very best vegetarian meat substitute dish I ever had was in Singapore, and was a tofu-skin "chicken" drumstick with sugarcane in the middle. It didn't really try to be like chicken, but was absolutely delicious.

@shang filling a comment up with quotes doesn't substitute for content or quality of argument. Some of those quotes have contexts that run contradictory to the haphazard 'points' (and i use that term loosely) that you're trying to make.

Looks impressive if you don't have the brains to see past entry level rabble-rousing.

Hahaha... seriously, what kind of passive aggressive bullshit is that? "Ignoring the theoretical underpinnings of socialism, because I've decided that that's waffling, I say Jesus was a socialist." Next time, maybe just write TL;DR and make a farting noise while rolling your eyes.

You can't dismiss the actual meaning of the word Socialist as 'semantics', if you're talking about whether or not something is socialist. That doesn't help the discussion.

In order to use socialism as you appear to be doing, you would have to first:
- ignore the history of socialism and its political development,
- ignore the entire body of academic work, current and past, on socialism, and
- ignore how the word socialism "IS used now, like it or not" in actual socialist or semi-socialist countries

By doing that you end up at your definition of the word, yes. But you had to take a pretty long detour to get to that point

Marx's quote on religion is pretty straightforward - it can be, as you say, open to interpretation, but it's generally agreed that he didn't say that your Jesus was a stand-up socialist. He is more commonly taken to mean that religion is a false response to the real suffering of the oppressed; religion provides a fiction of suffering and a fiction of redemption/happiness, that will never translate into real change. It makes the oppressed feel like they are bettering their lives, while actually keeping them passive and preventing them from changing anything.

The slightly larger context of the quote is this: "Das religiöse Elend ist in einem der Ausdruck des wirklichen Elendes und in einem die Protestation gegen das wirkliche Elend. Die Religion ist der Seufzer der bedrängten Kreatur, das Gemüth einer herzlosen Welt, wie sie der Geist geistloser Zustände ist. Sie ist das Opium des Volks."

I don't know how to make that more plain, but I can try. Religious suffering is on one hand a response to real suffering (wirkliche Elend, by which one would mean a materialistically determined actual lack of freedom, resources, physical wellbeing, etc), but it is also a false reaction against that real suffering. Real oppression creates suffering to which there could be a real respones, but religion instead substitutes in false suffering and false responses - it tries to tackle real suffering with metaphysical solutions. He goes on to say:

"Die Aufhebung der Religion als des illusorischen Glücks des Volkes ist die Forderung seines wirklichen Glücks."

This, too, seems pretty straightforward to me, but you might see 4 or 5 different things there. Religion teaches the people an illusory form of happiness, which doesn't actually change or even challenge the conditions of suffering, and must therefore be tossed out, for the people to ever achieve real happiness.

A fundamental difference here is that religious goodness is internally, individually, and fundamentally motivated. 'Good' is 'Good', and you as a Christian individual should choose to do Good. A goal of Marxism is to abolish that kind of fundamentalism and replace it with continuous criticism; creating a society that always questions, together, what good is, through the lens of dialectical materialism.

You might recognize this line of thinking* from what modern Europeans call the autonomous left wing, or what Marx and Trotsky called the Permanent Revolution, which Wikipedia helpfully comments on as "Marx outlines his proposal that the proletariat 'make the revolution permanent'. In essence, it consists of the working class maintaining a militant and independent approach to politics both before, during and after the 'struggle' which will bring the 'petty-bourgeois democrats' to power." Which sounds great, except it can also lead to purges, paranoia, and informant societies.

My entire point is that socialism and Christianity are entirely different beasts. One is a rich, layered mythology with an extremely deep academic and political history, but no modern critical or explanatory components.** The other is an academic theory of economics and politics, with all the tools of discourse of modern academia in its toolbelt, and a completely different critical and analytical goal.

TL;DR? Well, Jesus (in a lenient interpretation) taught that we should help the weak. Marx explained that the people should organize to eradicate the conditions that force weakness onto the people. Jesus
taught that greed would keep a man from heaven, Marx explained that religion, nationalism, tribalism and commodity fetishism blinded the people to its common materialist interests. Jesus taught that the meek will be rewarded for their meekness, and while on earth we should render unto Caesar what is Caesar's; Marx explained that meekness as a virtue is a way of preventing actual revolutionary change, and that dividing the world into the spiritual and the materialistic helped keep the people sedate and passive, which plays right into the hands of the Caesars.

*I'm just kidding, I know you don't recognize any of this


**There probably are modern scholars of Christianity who adapt and adopt some of the tools of modern academic discourse; I know too little about academic Christianity.

Beats the hell out of me.

Just to noodle around a bit, the only extreme I can think of about the scales would be to substitute an extremely low density object for the wood. Say, a helium filled balloon? But that assumes that she did in fact mean equal mass for the two objects, and wouldn't actually give valid readings on a scale in atmosphere anyway.

Extreme cases are a rather specialized approach, as I remember...its not really a common, or easy way to get answers. I got the feeling this was kind of a "wannabee" presentation. Like she wanted to do "Smarter every day" stuff but isn't quite able to find and explain interesting non-intuitive problems well.

Substitute "society" with "religion," and there you have all the world's problems.

I thought for sure this had been Sifted before, but I guess not.

The "one Nation, under rule" part is a bit of a bad seed since the phrase "under God" wasn't added until after WW2, so wouldn't need substitution if we lost, though I get what they are going for and so will give it somewhat a pass.

A poignant lesson on why giving pets as gifts is a disgustingly irresponsible thing to do. It IS like dropping off a child at someone's house with no warning, permanently. I've had it happen twice, and the next person to do it to us is going to get punched in the face for their 'gift'.

On another note, I'm glad they substituted a kid for most of the video, or it would have been even more disturbing to me. I think people that abandon animals like the 'parents' in the video should, themselves, be taken to a foreign country where they don't speak the language and left alone, naked, in the wilderness, preferably the desert....or Siberia. Somewhere they'll have to fend for themselves in a strange, inhospitable place for the rest of their lives.
Bastards.

That's insane. That sounds like a pretty blatantly self serving (and ridiculous) statement for a vegetarian cook to say.
Good meat takes way more proper prep work, you don't just slap it on the grill. I usually marinate meat for hours-days before grilling it, or coat it with dry rub and let it sit for an hour+.
Just read my above post for a totally simple and easy recipe for green beans that works for just about any vegetable you might cook.
Another good one is just pan fry in butter, olive oil, or sesame oil then splash in some soy sauce at the end. Soy/ginger salad dressing can be substituted for soy sauce for more flavor.
For a third simple recipe, lightly pan fry in butter, then add brown sugar and peppers (white, black, cayenne) to candy them. YUM.

The e-cigarettes I tried years ago when they first came out were crap and no substitute for what they have now, which has really only been around for a year or so in a convenient form. Probably there will be some decent studies in the very near future.

Part of the problem is that the drugstore stuff really doesn't work (and many are made by the tobacco companies, which is suspicious--they don't provide dosage information for one thing).

ed: Oh, and there are also a lot of people who don't quit nicotine, they just quit smoking and vape instead. Though it's too early to tell, vaping is almost certainly less harmful than smoking and may be effectively harmless. I don't know if you'd count that or not.

http://www.joeandmonkey.com/comic/20050223.gif

This came to mind, just substitute Daves now

Boy, will she be surprised to find out Mom is a snitch for the tooth fairy and totally tipped off that cheapskate dentophile. I hope for mom's sake she's never heard the saying 'snitches get stiches'.

On another note, are her teeth so bad that she really thought a folded piece of paper was an indistinguishable substitute? I think she should have tried a rock.

That was supposed to be a lead in to discussing BluesNews. "Uh huh. "

The internet. It builds trust and our relationships here are real and a great substitute for face to face interaction. I'm glad this is the future.

Is there a button for 67% sarcasm? Shit, 58% now.... fuck.

I don't see fist bumps much, but when I do, it's like @eric3579 said, they're usually between friends, after accomplishing something to express how awesome it was and a high-five just won't cut it. I've never personally seen anyone substitute a fist bump for a hand shake, but I have heard that people that have a fear of hand shakes and/or germs do substitute fist bumps for hand shakes.

As for your story, if the guy had been changing oil on cars all day, he may have offered the fist bump as an alternative to a high-five or hand shake out of courtesy because his hands were dirty.

I came back when I saw @speechless's comment. She is exactly right. Ignore does not work. It is a poor substitute for moderation.

Ignoring only works if everyone does it...and possibly not even then. It only takes one person to take the bait to make a troll thrive. If everyone actually did ignore, then it's no different from booting the troublemaker so quit beating around the bush and just boot the troublemaker. One method shifts the burden on the community members who many have given up after seeing how ineffectual ignore is and left, the other method shifts the burden where it should be, on those who run the site.

This site has been going downhill for a long while now because problem members have not been kicked out. It has been noted that the #1 video now only requires 40-ish upvotes where in years past it needed over double that.

I think I even recall @lucky760 voicing his concerns about the continued existence of this site in Sift Talk a while back.

All it takes is a short glance at comment histories to see who is here to contribute to the community and who is here only to incite and rile up and do not contribute to civilized discourse. Most people who read this will know who I am referring to. Dissenting opinions are still required to back their points up. Simply dissent by itself doesn't make the viewpoint valid or else you've just lowered yourself to the level of youtube comments, at a minimum, ad hom attacks and the bigger more well known logical fallacies should not be tolerated.

A good community requires moderation. All the strong forum communities out there depend on moderation to lay down the law on a regular basis...not just when one feels like showing up on the site once every month or so.