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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • All written accounts of God are produced by humans for an audience of other humans.

    In the same way that we might describe a storm cloud as “angry” or a sunny day as “cheerful”, one might apply emotional descriptors to an omnipotent divine force in order to personify an impersonal and abstract entity.

    Past that, assuming you believe that a divine being is above humanity, why wouldn’t they have emotions? Emotions are a feature of sentience and God is supposed to be a super-sentient creature. If anything, it would experience these emotions more intensely and intricately than its creations. The human rage of a shout or the despair of a cry becomes the earth-splitting eruption of a volcano or the suffocating deluge of a flood.

    At the same time, it is the overwhelming longing for companionship that drives a God to form life from the void of space. The intense joy in the creative act leads this fundamental superhuman force to tirelessly build an entire universe. The deep and profound pride and love which brings them among their creations clothed in their own form, willing to endure the humiliation of this avatar form in order to enlighten and elevate their divine progeny to their own level.

    Absent these primal emotional urges, why would a God choose to be a God at all, and not simply languish within the darkness for eternity, content to the echoing silence of dead space?



  • Whataboutism is saying how evil America is and acting like that makes China less bad.

    Aaaaah! My mistake. I didn’t realize Whataboutism was America specific. All this time I thought it was a generic rhetorical technique where you try to deflect the blame for your own country’s missteps by insisting any other country was worse.

    But apparently America is exempt. Perhaps even… exceptional? Is there some kind of American Exceptionalism at play here? One in which America is beyond criticism?

    Trump is a pedophile. This doesn’t make China suck less

    Okay, but what if the Chinese economy promotes things Americans desire - green alternative energy, public health care and education accessible to residents without respect to income or ethnic background, a near totally-equal redistribution of land among the peasantry following the collapse of the landlord-backed government?

    Would that make China suck less?



  • Yes America is a shit show right now that doesn’t magically make the Chinese government not suck.

    This is Whataboutism!

    Whataboutism! Whataboutism! Whataboutism!

    America has concentration camps and is arresting innocent adults and children and filling those camps.

    Help me. I am a 8 year old boy living in the illegitimate Yankee Capitalist regime. President Xi, our shelves are empty and we are hungry. I am asking you to liberate my state of Connecticut with your Chengdu J-20 Stealth air superiority fighters and your Dongfeng 41 Missiles.


  • keyword being “allegations”

    So, the abduction of Gedhun Choekyi Nyima is more than a mere allegation. Of course, the entire selection process for the Panchen and Dalai Lamas is itself rife with controversy, as it functionally involves randomly selecting some local child and whisking them away from their parents to be indoctrinated by Tibetian monks.

    Similarly, there’s the open question of Taiwan’s sovereignty, as well as a history of Chinese intervention in neighboring territories. Nothing compared to the US decapitation and conquest of Iraq or Afghanistan, of course. But China was absolutely involved in armed conflict with the Vietnamese back in the 1960s/70s.

    You can eek out parallels and hand wave comparisons if you know the history well enough and where to look. Chinese private security firms are all over Africa, for instance. Plenty of comparisons you can make between that and the old US/Europe model of filibustering, if you squint and don’t think too hard.

    TL;DR; its far more than just allegations. The real difference is in scope. US interventions are orders of magnitude larger.