Teacher here. It's made-up-nonsense. I don't give a shit what gender or sexual orientation a kid is and im CERTAINLY not going to try to convince anyone to change anything about themselves.

That said, I'm going to acknowledge that gay/trans people exist in authorship and literature as it arises. You can't read someone like Whitman (Leaves of Grass, arguably America's greatest poet) and not come across references to sexuality either implicit or explicit. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45472/i-sing-the-body-electric

It becomes relevant in passages like this:

5
This is the female form,
A divine nimbus exhales from it from head to foot,
It attracts with fierce undeniable attraction,
I am drawn by its breath as if I were no more than a helpless vapor, all falls aside but myself and it,
Books, art, religion, time, the visible and solid earth, and what was expected of heaven or fear’d of hell, are now consumed,
Mad filaments, ungovernable shoots play out of it, the response likewise ungovernable,
Hair, bosom, hips, bend of legs, negligent falling hands all diffused, mine too diffused,
Ebb stung by the flow and flow stung by the ebb, love-flesh swelling and deliciously aching,
Limitless limpid jets of love hot and enormous, quivering jelly of love, white-blow and delirious juice,
Bridegroom night of love working surely and softly into the prostrate dawn,
Undulating into the willing and yielding day,
Lost in the cleave of the clasping and sweet-flesh’d day.

----------------------------------
Maybe a conversation like:

"'Love flesh swelling' like he's in love with some woman and they...he...?"

"Probably not, he didn't have any serious female relationships as far as I am aware."

"But the title is 'The female form'"

"Well, it's possible, but it's not likely the case that he was talking about himself being in love with a woman. This poem is in the text but he wrote many other pieces about he-himself falling into and out of love with various men and we have letters documenting those relationships with his male significant others. Although, I'm not sure what to call them because gay marriage would have been illegal at the time. He's likely writing the poem in a way where he appreciates the female form and sees men who are drawn to it like the way I appreciate watching bees act obsessively driven to the middle of flowers. I like watching Bees in action, but that doesn't mean I'm going all pollen crazy, still I appreciate it for what it is."
-------------------

This is an example of how discussion of sexuality would come up in my classroom as I imagine it. Note how I'm not trying to convince the kid I'm talking to to turn gay like it's a big game of rainbow-red-rover or something. Nevertheless, knowing the author's sexual preference in this instance informs our understanding of the piece.


My own personal theory?
The people railing against things like this are the same shitheads that can't be bothered to read ANYTHING and instead giggle and guffaw at "hurhurhurhur he hadd'a boner" where I get to live an early stage of Idocracy.

Also, I agree that the "funky stuff" shouldn't be just avoided altogether. For goodness sake, just let teachers have the difficult conversation that everyone is avoiding. Reminds me of when Peggy Hill was struggling to say "Penis" when she was assigned sex ed.

Maybe what these people mean (whether they know it or not) is that their belief in a god gave them the false(yet real enough to them) confidence that they would be ok, which gave them the courage and energy to push through and do all the things to make sure they had the opportunity to have the medical staff fix them. It's like how a lot of people have religion to thank for getting sober and off the street, not because of the divine influence of the hand of god or some shit... some people just need the religious 'narrative' to help them keep moving forward, where others may not need it at all and not see the point.

because obviously if god can physically save this dude's life, then he would have also had the power to make that barrel survive the hot round which I'm sure the dude in question would have preferred.

ROTFLMAHS!!!

If you died and God was standing before you bathed in peace inducing angelic light performing miracles, but wasn't orange with a disheveled long hair squirrel on his head, you would deny his divinity and call him a liberal tool.

You are correct, if someone calling themselves God stands in front of me with what appears to be *I'm dead relatives I would assume either 1) I had gone bat shit insane or 2) some alien intelligence was trying to trick me into the matrix. The only time a being claiming to be God might have any credibility is after I'm dead, and even then I would be suspicious, maybe they just made me think I died.
The supernatural isn't real. There is no magic. Ghosts don't exist. Demons and angles aren't real. Neither is the Easter bunny, Santa Claus, manbearpig, nor the great pumpkin.
Any true God would know this, and know I don't believe in infantile fantasy, it would have intentionally made me that way. If unquestioning belief in the unbelievable is what it requires, it needs to put it in me.

Oh Bobby. What did I say that's untrue? I researched, did you? I didn't just repost another unverified political smear from a 100% untrustworthy source, did you? I offered facts you can verify, did you? Seems not, since you didn't even know this is a Trump administration creation, not Biden.

🤦‍♂️

It seems one of us does have difficulty with truth, fact, and reason. I'll gladly put it to a public vote which one, I'm certain enough of the outcome. After all, only one of us believes project veritas....nuff said.

*get it?

Wow, the lack of self awareness is unbelievable.

Another point – to facilitate a discussion, I think we all assume that hard work is intrinsically beneficial. It is sort of a control we have to accept to engage with the valid idea of this video.

However, all hard work is not necessarily good for society or how we define success for us individually. For me, a good example is how I went about dating and eventually finding a lasting relationship that I’m happy with. I really did work hard on myself and my communication skills, but if you took a snapshot of wherever I was over the course of probably 15 years, I think much of my hard work might have been counter-productive. But then, look at it from the “success” point, and the hard work had a clear line, giving me the experience/education I needed to get to where I am.

And then, who is to say that in another ten years my ideas of success won’t evolve revealing that this current moment is another step towards a different goal?

Forgive me if this seems like a non-sequitur, but hand-waving “God has a plan” undercuts thinking about any of this clearly. At best, it cannot matter. If you cannot know the plan god has for you, and puny mortal minds cannot possibly figure it out, then what does it matter? Taken to worse extremes, it leads to the misunderstanding the video seeks to counter. “Since god planned it, it must be okay” is a half-step away from “I earned all of this with my hard work alone”. And, inserting god in there is even more insidious because you are replacing the idea of hard work with divine intention, or at least tacking it on so that it undercuts any argument against the status quo.

Romans 10:9-10

If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved

When you do that, believing that Jesus died for your sins, God will save you and make you a new person. You're good if you don't care where you are going after you die, if you leave it as you believe up to chance. Yet the evidence that God exists is undeniable, and the coming of His Son Jesus Christ was predicted by prophecies going back thousands of years. So you're not really leaving it up to chance because the scripture tells you that you have no excuse for ignorance.

Romans 1:18-20

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, 19because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them. 20For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse

You would say, I am sure, that you haven't seen any evidence for God but the scripture says you have and you have suppressed the truth about it. I believe scripture and in our conversations I am sorry to say you are always poisoning the well of reasoned debate with mockery and ridicule. What is behind that is a heavy bias and angst which keeps you from seeing who God is. Being obstinate against the truth of Gods word is foolish. Why not give God the benefit of the doubt and at least ask Him to show you if what I have been telling you all of these years is true?

The cult of education. OK. *doublepromote a *quality outline for a successful community.

Seems more like a commune than a cult though, imo. No religious dogma, no claims of divinity or direct connection to divinity by the charismatic but strict leader, no special compensation for the leader (like getting to sleep with all the women in the community), not even the claim that his way is the only way. It's hard for me to get to "cult" with all that missing.

It's as if Trump, the GOP, and their voters, can't pass 6th grade civics. America isn't a dictatorship, as much as it is heading that way with the current administration and the GOP. If there's two parties that have opposing views, the solution isn't "our way or the highway" but find the middle ground. Seems since Obama took office, the GOP's definition of middle ground is agreeing to 80-99% of their demands. This is of course because of religious indoctrination, where authority isn't earned, but given by divine right from God to only a select few, and it's everyone's place just to shut up and take it.

Basically the Emperor, a human who was effectively immortal due to his psychic power constantly regenerating his cells, began to be considered a god because of a combination of lies from the chaos lords and because some of his followers simply couldn't reconcile his existence without him being divine. He constantly fought against it, telling them he was not a god.

Due to the chaos lords interference, a cult formed that would accept him as nothing less than a God. They fought a huge war and the Emperor was triumphant, but was so wounded that he was going to die. Unfortunately, his mind and psychic powers control FTL travel and some other stuff, so he had his people modify a 'throne' he had been creating to help him control the daily duties his mind performed easier. The modifications would keep his mind functional even as his body rotted and decayed.

The great irony is that he began to be worshiped anyway and his skull is the symbol of the imperium because it shows his willingness to sacrifice himself to 'protect' Mankind.

The effect of trillions of human beings expressing a deep faith in His divinity has massively empowered the Emperor's mind and soul. Whatever He may have been before the Horus Heresy, the Emperor now truly is a God within the Warp, equal in power to any one of the four major Chaos Gods, and very likely as powerful as all four of them combined, as He has become perhaps the strongest spiritual force for Order in the Milky Way Galaxy. His mind must claim the life energies of 1,000 human psychics a day to empower FTL and other functions of the imperium.

It occurs to me this may be a highly regional food item. Cheese curds are really just chunks of (typically) mozzarella or cheddar cheese. Usually about the size of a regular or large marble. They can be bought fresh, or at restaurants you'll generally get them deep fried. That's what White Castle had a few months ago, and they were not quite MN State Fair quality (which are divine), but pretty damned good for the price.

If you want the best possible unfried cheese curds though, look to Wisconsin. In rural areas you can get them ridiculously fresh, and you'll know if you have - they squeak when you bite into them. That stops happening in less than a day, regardless of how they're kept.

Edit: Cheese curds are also a vital component of poutine, a Quebecois dish. French fries, cheese curds, crumbled bacon, and brown gravy. So goddamn bad for you / delicious.

Saw this story earlier today. Excellent work of art!

Why do Buddhist monks make sand mandalas?

When the mandala is finally finished, however long it takes for the monks to deal in this divine geometry of the heavens, they pray over it — and then they destroy it. ... Because the underlying message of the mandala ceremony is that nothing is permanent. Nothing.