if you’re born into a religious family initially you just adopt it

Right. Because there’s no inherent reason not to do so. And little kids tend to want to follow along with what they’re elders are doing.

Compare it to how most kids initially believe Santa Claus exists because they were told so.

Kids are told that they get presents by pleasing their parents. And then the decision making / agency is displaced onto a fictitious figure. That’s a very neat analogy for religion in the aggregate. Whether or not you “believe in Santa”, you’re still getting gifts based on your parents’ resources and generosity. If you want the newest kids’ favorite widget, you’re following the letter of the law whether or not you adhere to the spirit.

You can also participate in some church community stuff without being a member or even going to church.

If you’ve got friends/family who are members/do go, sure. Because they’re your social connection.

But you’ll struggle to join a community event if you don’t know anybody - or even when/where the event takes place. Nevermind knowing what’s in the works, what needs volunteers, what needs money, and who is in charge of leading them. The more you want to participate, the more you need to attend the religious church functions. The more you want to get into leadership, the more you need to demonstrate your piety.

Everyone is born into the world entirely ignorant. Cultures, customs, languages, and superstitions espoused by their parents, teachers, and peers are adopted as a matter of survival. And as the individual develops more autonomy, they use the information they gathered in their youth to navigate into new cultures and belief systems, in pursuit of improved material conditions.

You can be born into a Catholic family and become Atheist just as easily as you can be born into an Atheist family and become Catholic. What has driven the modern collapse in religiosity is - at least in my view - the mass migration driven by economic expansion and ecological collapse. People aren’t just waking up one day and deciding they aren’t gullible anymore. They’re being shuffled around by tidal forces and torn away from the historical cultures and infrastructure that had reproduced their families’ beliefs.

As a kid, my mom was deeply Catholic and tried to get us to attend church. But we moved several times, and after each move we found ourselves at a new church (often not even a Catholic church) with an alien congregation and divergent dogma. So what had rooted her and her sisters and parents and grandparents in Catholicism never took root with me or my sister.

By contrast, my wife’s family lived in Galveston for four generations. Virtually her entire family is devote practicing Catholics. She only slipped through the cracks because… her dad moved around a lot, particularly after her parents got divorced. Everyone else - even two of her transgender cousins - are still practicing. Churches are, at their heart, social institutions. And I think modern New Atheists often miss that fact in their quest to Own The Dumb Pious Folks.

Opus 4.6 is genuinely pretty decent at programming now if you give it a good backbone to build off of.

Soup from a Stone.

Amazed they didn’t ask for 5-10 years of experience in AI coding.

Deliberately formed a number of minority controlled governments, with a mandate to kill the majority ethnic group if they got out of line.

Israel was one of these, but hardly the only one.

The main players in the Middle East have been fighting for the last 3,000

That’s wildly ahistorical.

What you’re describing is the Ottoman Empire, a region that was largely stable and peaceful for centuries.

In and out. Twenty minute quagmire.

You can just withdraw if things go bad, because it’s not like Iran will continue to bombard US and Israeli bases if we just shout “Time Out” loudly enough.

Speed running the Tet Offensive in weeks rather than years

Built to Fail: The story of 21st century consumer technology.

no way this skinny CEO eats that shit

I think “Super Size Me” touched on this. Calories in the burger aren’t as impactful as calories in the fries and drink.

Why is this allowed?

It’s a private company operating under a contract that affords representatives ability to deny you payment for care on conditions that favor the company.

Why would it not be allowed?

That’s some “Heartland Institute” tier bullshit math, if ever I’ve heard it.

I bet it’s a mix of being younger and having more money.

Oscar Wilde was gay, are you trying to suggest Victorian Britain wasn’t homophobic and repressive

Victorian England was phenomenally gay. The English practically invented “cruising in the park”, because so many homosexual men were looking to hook up with one another in the major metro areas. It was the persistent open and free expression of queerness that prompted a reactionary parliament to try and criminalize it.

You’re staring at a five alarm fire and concluding nothing is hot because so many state bureaucrats are spraying water everywhere.

Oscar Wilde’s huge and lasting popularity was clear evidence of queer English culture persevering over the purdish Protestant ethos.

Kissing as a sign of friendship/goodwill is not a sign of homosexuality or of acceptance of homosexuality.

You are in some deep seated denial if you don’t think homosexuals express affection through kissing.

Your claim about the “prelevance” of gay culture in USSR is based on a link to a lengthy and wordy PDF

Yeah, I’m sorry if the size and depth of the document scared you off.

If you’re arguing against the idea that USSR was the most henious country against LGBT in history

I’m arguing the homosexual urge is strong and universal. Russia is no exception. And that, when the political moment allows for it, the expressions of queer love flourish.

What we saw in the USSR, early in the revolution, was an instance of that flourishing. One that reactionary strains in future state governments failed to suppress, time and time again.

Liberals want to deny that this golden age of free love and open queer expression occurred, because it flies in the face of their orthodoxy. But it happened repeatedly over the history of the USSR. Soviet peoples openly expressed their queer love and accepted the queer love of their neighbors. Soviet governments bent in the face of it, even as the reactionaries fought against it. And even now, in an outright fascist post-Soviet nation, queer love endures.

You don’t need perfect liberal conditions to enjoy a queer society. Hell, quite a bit of modern western history suggests liberalism is as much a threat to queer expression as any socialist government. What you need are queer people united in purpose and committed to one another’s liberation. Russia and the surrounding states are filled with these people and will continue to be filled with these people, whether you choose to acknowledge them or not.

But eVeRyThInG i WrOtE wAs PrAcTiCaLlY wRoNg.

How do you explain the continued prevalence of gay culture in a country that has so militantly sought to oppress it?

1917–1927: Don’t ask, don’t tell.

After the October Revolution of 1917, homosexuality was decriminalised in Soviet Russia with the repeal of the legal code of the Russian Empire

Don’t ask, don’t tell

“Don’t ask, don’t tell” (DADT) was the official United States policy on military service of homosexual people for a period of over 17 years, starting in the mid-1990s.

The policy prohibited military personnel from discriminating against or harassing closeted homosexual or bisexual service members or applicants, while barring openly gay, lesbian, or bisexual persons from military service.

One of these things is not like the other.

And of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Practically everything else you wrote is also wrong.

homophobia was always the norm.

LGBTQ history in the Soviet Union

A history of LGBTQ rights in modern Russia: From progress to despair

Seems like it varied wildly.

The early Soviet period made Russia one of the most progressive countries on earth, only for the Stalin era to radically reverse the gains decades later. Then Glasnost reversed the reversal in a period of general liberalization, only for the late-Yeltsin and subsequent Putin governments to snap back the reforms as a means of purging the state of liberal institutions.

Nonetheless, Eastern Europe and Russia has always been super gay. The prevalence of gay culture in the Eastern Bloc has endured in the hard times and flourished in the good times.

the wiki even shows it was used in Imperial Russia and is an Orthodox Christian thing

Cause it was gay back then, too.

In the same way that you can point to the Stonewall Riots in the US and say “They’re not gay, look at what the cops did to the gay community!” you can squeeze your eyes shut and proclaim “Russians weren’t gay, because Stalin and Putin both turned on his gay peers”.

What you reject in the positive is revealed in the negative. This is a culture steeped in gayness. The modern state is chronically at war with its gay population because - despite a generation of homophobic media and state violence and denial at every institutional level - they keep on fighting.

1930s USSR was super gay.

It took decades of reactionary influencing and organizing to turn the Eastern Bloc into a horrifying ultra-nationalist paleoconservative hell hole.

We’ve seen similar patterns in West Africa, Latin America, and the Pacific Rim.

Me: “Just FYI, you’ve got undiagnosed ADHD.”

Friend 1: “Wow, what can I do about this?”

Me: “You’re too poor to access mental health care, and most professionals haven’t accepted this as a diagnosis for your racial/gender cohort. So, unfortunately, there’s nothing to be done.”

Friend 2: “What about me?”

Me: “You’re transgender.”

Friend 2: “What the fuck did you just call me?!”