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.

On the one hand, that old person is an incredible asshole doing their best to traumatize a train driver, but on the other hand that crossing seems ridiculously unsafe. What the hell, Brazil.

eek. climbing up a tall structure is understandable but holding on with one hand or doing hand jump hand stands on a beam. No one is ever going to say 'he died doing what he loved'

it is interesting to see how this is playing out.this poor kid is getting used to promote narratives for people who really do not care about this kid,and it appears..he may not even have invented anything.
https://youtu.be/CEmSwJTqpgY

he probably just did this to impress his teacher and..wow..did things get out of hand fast.

on the one hand you have an authoritarian state who is petrified of brown people pissing themselves,and on the other you have people using this for political expediency to further a narrative.

and all ahmed wanted to do was impress his engineering teacher.(my assumption)

If vegans are getting into arguments with you about whether their food is healthier than yours, well, maybe they're right, maybe they're wrong. I listen to my buddy extolling the benefits of his paleo diet. If he's quick about it, I don't see the harm, whether he's right or not. If he won't shut up about it, or tries to push it on me, he's being a jerk. It sounds like you might have met some vegans who are jerks. So have I.

I also don't think your final question was genuine. You've clearly thought about this long enough to see how avoiding animal products reduces the amount of mistreatment. If you don't think it's important, or you don't think it's worth it, that's fine. The population of dairy cows is large enough that the 1-2million vegans in this country certainly affects how many are bred and subjected to the treatment they receive.

But telling me I shouldn't want meat is just bizarre. It should be pretty clear by now that I'm a vegan because I object to needlessly killing or mistreating animals, and try to reduce that number. I'm not offended by eating meat, just what has to happen to get it on my plate. If Nike used child slave labor to make its shoes, and I didn't approve of child slave labor, would you criticize me for buying another brand of shoes because I "shouldn't want shoes?" Meat tastes great. I don't like killing animals. There is no contradiction between those two sentences.

It sounds like your issue is with the "tells you all the time" part of your analogy, and that's tricky. On the one hand, people who sermonize and try to vilify your decisions are being jerks. On the other hand, if a cause is important enough, it's clearly worth being a jerk. It's a sliding scale. Civil rights campaigners were moralizing jerks too, but in hindsight, we mostly feel they were justified. The inquisition, less so. Some animal activists feel they fall reasonably well on the scale.

There's a long history of people trying to make other lead moral lives. And there's a long history of people getting various degrees of pissed off about it. I would encourage you to tell individuals who actively annoy you to stuff it, and to just relax about the rest of us.

And if you want moralizers to leave you alone, I'd also encourage you not to call their moral choices "stupid" on the internet. Counter-intuitive, I know, but give it a try.

I'd be more worried about the guys who kill 1,600 people and aren't emotionally traumatized... The fact he's ridiculed by his former pilot mates is disturbing, that they can so distance themselves from killing is scary... of course we have a nation full of people who claim to be pro-life on one hand, yet fully support the preemptive killing of people who haven't done anything to us yet, and indeed may have never participated in any direct or indirect attacks on US soil, let alone against US citizens abroad. It's one thing to target and kill people who were involved in 9/11 or other attacks against US facilities, but preemptively killing people we suspect may become involved is creating a far bigger problem than it solves. This is why we need people like Bernie Sanders rather than any of the other candidates on either side of the aisle, all of whom (besides perhaps Rand Paul, who's fairly heartless towards America's working poor as the rest of his party) will continue the Bush doctrine of shoot and kill first, ask questions later, and never have any regret...

Yeah, I saw that. I really don't know how I feel about it.
On one hand, yeah, it's ridiculous and therefore cool, but there's a part of me that likes the idea of surfing being human powered and sees this kind of thing as an invasion. I feel the same way about snow mobiles and jet skis.

It's completely irrational, I know. I think I'm just turning into a grumpy old man

You can make a cube appear mixed up with surprisingly few moves, so given how practised he is with one hand (wink wink) I think most if not all of his tricks could just be being very good at memorising cube positions and then doing the moves needed "blind".

It doesn't hurt that people are unfamiliar with the cubes compared with cards for tricks either.

I've watched much of the clip at 1/4 speed and learned a little. SPOILER ALERT.

The marker vanishes are now definitely obvious. The first time he slips it into his vest. The second time he flips it to the back of his fingers then drops his hand behind him and discards it.





So, the vest definitely does come into play a lot. He also pushed a card into the lower opening in his vest at about 3:45 while misdirecting by spinning a card in his other hand.



That's all good and fine, but other things are not simple sleight of hand.

At 5:10 with his back turned he shows us the signed card with the hand behind his back. Then in full view he simply turns the card against his back. Then his other hand raises up from the other side of his body to reveal the "same" signed card. (The one that was in view, btw, he tucks up into his vest at this point, keeping in hand the blank that was paired with it.) The only possible explanation for the same card being in two places at once is there must be multiple copies of each signed card, which means he has stooges who sign the exact same way every time or he has a technological advantage like others have mentioned (tiny scanner and printer).

The other thing that confounds is how he has a signed card in one hand and a stack of cards in the other. Then in full view the tall stack shrinks down to (approximately) one card and the single card grows into a stack instantaneously. I guess there must be some kind of technological solution to this as well, but I don't know how a functional stack of cards (and not just the appears of a stack of cards) could collapse and appear... unless they aren't functional and it's a trick deck that can easily expand or shrink to look like a deck or single card.

At 6:00 when he just shakes the bag and the signed card inside changes to the other signed card, I think he just flips the bag around with his shake motion and that the single card is printed on the front with one signature card and the other signature card on the back.

That's the only thing that makes sense... which again requires a special scanner and printer setup... I guess.

Huh.

The immediate, most obvious bias is that he has one hand full of chocolate bars, and the other hand with only one silver bar.

If I were in that situation...

My ignorance about the value of silver and how to identify it would come in to play. I have no idea how much 1 oz of silver is worth, and I still have no idea when it's 10 oz.

Taking the chocolate bar would cost me nothing. It's easy to tell it's real. It looks like he's got lots, so I don't feel greedy. It's consumable, so it won't take up any space. And hey, free chocolate!

Taking the silver has added work and uncomfortable emotions attached. I still don't trust this stranger I met on the street. IF the silver is real, I have no clue how much it's worth. AND I'm still stuck with this lump of metal that I can't do anything with unless I find someone to sell it to. Since I've never sold silver before, I expect to get ripped off. I don't know if I trust a coin shop like the "WE BUY GOLD" people to treat me fairly, and selling online is a hassle. It will probably sit in my house for weeks. Best case scenario, I earn some money after jumping through a few hoops. Worst case scenario, I feel cheated and have a bad day.

Honestly, presented the way it is in this video, and not knowing the worth of the silver, I would probably have taken the chocolate too. (Though... I don't actually like milk chocolate. I probably would have just said "No thanks!" and kept walking.)

Tour de france?? Why is everyone speaking english?

And if that dude has 88 kilos of post... he is one strong motherfucker to pick it up with one hand like that....

It's a tricky one. On one hand it could be improved, but on the other hand I'm happy with a system that converted UKIP's (Team Purple) 13% into 0%.

Well happy with that part, less happy about being stuck with the bloody Tories for another five years.

*ban

related:
@https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yO-a8fFZ0Qo#t=40

http://videosift.com/video/Fastest-Kinder-Surprise-Egg-Unboxing-With-Just-One-Hand

http://videosift.com/video/8-Adet-S-rpriz-Yumurta-Acma-Unboxing-8-Surprise-Eggs

I believe someone won a Nobel prize for spending several decades of his life cracking the knuckles of one hand and just that one hand every day to see if there are really any negative effects from knuckle-cracking.

In his case there weren't.