> Have you read the Bible? It's shockingly different from what people believe is written there. It is a post-apocalyptic survival guide, as well as a collection of human stories and ideas that might date back hundreds of thousands of years.
You must mean hundreds or thousands, right? Modern homo-sapiens are not hundreds of thousands of years old.
> Have you read the Quran? Reading it is essential to understanding Muslims and their faith. It is first and foremost an anti-christian book, and the faith is foremost anti-christian. Just as christendom at one time was foremost anti-pagan.
I've only read parts of the Quran in translation, and I wouldn't say that I understand it that well. It's not organized in a narrative structure like the bible, and there are a lot of parts that are impossible to understand without outside knowledge, like a surah that condemns Abu Lahab but doesn't explain who he was [1]. The Quran is not really the sort of book that you can just read on its own without guidance and expect to understand.
So, with the preface that you should take what I have to say about the Quran with a grain of salt, I'm not sure how you could take away that it's primarily an anti-Christian text. Yes, it criticizes Christians and Jews a lot, but it also has good things to say about them. For example:
"Indeed, the believers, Jews, Christians, and Sabians—whoever truly believes in Allah and the Last Day and does good will have their reward with their Lord. And there will be no fear for them, nor will they grieve." [2]
The main villains of the Quran are polytheists (like Abu Lahab). It talks about them a lot more and never has anything good to say [3]. By contrast, the New Testament barely even mentions polytheists or pagans – most of its criticism is directed against Jews.
Muslims traditionally believe that Jesus was the messiah, that he was born of a virgin, that he performed miracles, and that he's going to return and rule the world in a future era [4]. It's also said that Muhammad was identified as a prophet by a Christian monk named Bahira [5]. Early on, Orthodox Christians identified Islam as a heretical form of Christianity, not a different religion [6]. These do not seem like traits of a religion that is foremost anti-Christian.
It's easy for anybody to find a Quran and read it for themselves. The book cannot be more clear and concise regarding christians. Considering that Mohammad was familiar with christianity, and that the message most repeated in the Quran is that you should not join God with other gods and that you will go to hell if you do – I would say that the primary message of the book is anti-christian. Not against Jesus, but against those who worship him as God.
The most famous saying in Islam (which you all know) is clear about the strict monotheistic message. While the most famous saying in Christendom (which you all know), is clear about the trinity message.
As for joining God with other gods, this became a hallmark of Christendom even more so than just the trinity. But this is also after the time of Mohammad, and bears no relevance when talking about the Quran.
No matter which, the Quran and the Bible are two very different scripts, even though there is a popular belief that they are similar. Anybody who has read both can see that similarities are very few.
It's funny how people in this thread keep saying "well if you're going to complain about people being penalized for not using apps, you might as well complain about people being penalized for not using telephones/cars/internet"... and yes, I am going to complain about all of those things. I imagine that many or most homeless people don't have reliable access to any of the above. I have an anxiety disorder that makes it hard for me to drive or talk on the phone, and I'm sure there are many people with more extreme conditions for whom it's impossible. There are people like Richard Stallman and members of certain religious communities who have strong moral objections to using certain technologies. Society should accommodate all sorts of people and all sorts of ways of living.
> I imagine that many or most homeless people don't have reliable access to any of the above.
In the US there is a specific government program called "Lifeline" that provides cell phone service to low income people, https://www.fcc.gov/general/lifeline-program-low-income-cons... (whether it gets DOGEd remains to be seen...) And where I live there are a bunch of programs that provide free cell phones to homeless people.
It's not a panacea because lots of homeless people have other problems that make it difficult to keep a cell phone and not lose it. But that's really a separate issue - not having access is really not much of a barrier for the homeless, at least in the US.
Immigrants are often left out for various reasons, such as not having the right documents, having an unsupported kind of passport, not having an address they can register as their home, not having an app store account in the right country, not having a local payment method, and a variety of other issues.
IMHO at some point it makes sense to start requiring the internet, it makes a lot of things easier. But when we do that we need to ensure that everyone is supported. For example ensuring that people have ready internet access at public libraries. Providing government-provided email inboxes for receiving government communication (lots of homeless people get locked out of regular free mail providers). Train support staff at these libraries (or whatever institution provides these services) to help people who need assistance though the government processes, including doing it on their behalf when required.
For me, it's less about lifestyle choices, and more about managing failure domains. If a person is kicked off their ISP/ cell carrier due to a private dispute with them, why should their entire life have to grind to a screeching halt in every other area? It's maddening how little recourse there is and how difficult it can be if you lose both your phone and number, and I vehemently disagree that we should be ok with any of it.
If we replace "taxes" with "paying for an army, paying for police, etc." than the above statement seems strange. I can understand "I don't like what society choose to build (with the taxes)", but some things can't be let to the free market.
> I have to go do the fucking IRS's job
That's a society choice. I have no experience with IRS, but other countries have tax systems that are much more automatic (come prefilled with most info for example). But taxes are maybe a bit higher (because if you don't do the job, someone needs to maintain the systems that allow the automation).
The only reason you have to do the IRS' job is because the "free market" you love so much spends obscene amounts of money buying out your government and making sure people have to use their products in order to not go insane filing their taxes.
In most countries filing taxes is a painless process that takes 5 minutes and is more or less completely automated for you.
Sorry to hear about your condition, and while I think society can decide to accommodate to some conditions, I disagree with that idea that it "should accommodate". It is a common decision, and sometimes the answer will be "no, we don't accommodate for that, sorry". In the end, everything has a cost (being it effort, resources, time, etc.).
Regarding the article, there are many cheap smartphones (<100eur) so I wonder if it isn't just fear of the new that stops people using them. I keep a smartphone around 4-5 years and my 10 year old phone still works ok. If people just don't want to change or learn new things, I would found that much more worrying...
> Sorry to hear about your condition, and while I think society can decide to accommodate to some conditions, I disagree with that idea that it "should accommodate". It is a common decision, and sometimes the answer will be "no, we don't accommodate for that, sorry". In the end, everything has a cost (being it effort, resources, time, etc.).
This falls apart when you realize this isn't just a consistent percentage of the population. It's a large portion of the population at different portions of their lives. It's something like 90% of adults will be disabled in their lives.
How many times have you lost your phone, or broken it without an immediately available backup?
In your world, people in wheelchairs would be housebound. But I guess we shouldn't accommodate them by requiring wheelchair ramps or curb cut-outs. They are lesser than us.
The world is not what you or me want is what you can convince enough people to do. In the country were I choose to pay taxes, people in wheelchairs are well accommodated.
But you know what that also means? That the same resources used for the ramps are not used to help someone that maybe starves to death somewhere else. I can't say I know which of the two I would choose, but I will not imply that the ones making a choice think "some are lesser than us".
Probably you will say "we can do both", "why choose", or something similar. But practically, all resources I know seem to be finite (time, energy, people). If you have infinite resources that I am not aware of, please fix all the problems.
> In fact in Judeo-Christian thinking, to do this requires people receiving a "new heart, a heart of flesh instead of a heart of stone" from God. (I saw "Judeo-" because the passages is from Ezekiel, which is common to both. I do not know if rabbinical thinking agrees, however.)
It doesn't. Judaism holds that the soul starts out pure, having been made in the image of G-d, and it only becomes impure through wrongdoing. All humans are born with an impulse to do evil, the Yetzer Hara, but we're also created with the power to overcome it. And when we have done evil, we have the ability to atone and return our souls to the pure state they were created in. That happens, for instance, on Yom Kippur.
The context of the verse from Ezekiel is:
> O mortal, when the House of Israel dwelt on their own soil, they defiled it with their ways and their deeds […] So I poured out My wrath on them […] I scattered them among the nations […] But when they came to those nations, they caused My holy name to be profaned, in that it was said of them, “These are GOD’s people, yet they had to leave their land.” […] Say to the House of Israel: Thus said the Sovereign GOD: Not for your sake will I act, O House of Israel, but for My holy name, which you have caused to be profaned among the nations to which you have come. […] I will take you from among the nations and gather you from all the countries, and I will bring you back to your own land. I will sprinkle pure water upon you, and you shall be purified: I will purify you from all your defilement and from all your fetishes. And I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit into you: I will remove the heart of stone from your body and give you a heart of flesh;" https://www.sefaria.org/Ezekiel.36.17-26
Ezekiel lived during the Babylonian exile. At face value, the text is saying that the people of Israel have been exiled because of their sins, but it makes a prophecy that G-d will cause them to stop sinning and return them to their land. That eventually did happen under Cyrus the Great. This is a constant cycle in the bible: When things are good, the Israelites forget G-d's teachings. Then something bad happens, but G-d redeems the Israelites from their suffering, which leads them to follow G-d again. Then thing get good again, and they start to forget G-d once more...
When it says that G-d will give the house of Israel a new heart, it's not (at face value) saying that individual people will literally receive new spirits (or otherwise be metaphysically transformed). Nor is it saying that G-d will literally sprinkle water on them. These are poetic ways of saying that the house of Israel will stop worshiping idols (etc), the same way that happened many times before in the Torah. You can of course add a layer of exegesis and make it about individual believers today instead of the nation of Israel in Babylonia of the 6th-century BCE. That's fine, the rabbinic tradition does that sort of thing all the time too. But at that point you're firmly in Christian territory and not in the space shared between Judaism and Christianity.
TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) are generally left-wing, despite holding a reactionary view on trans people. That sort of comes with the territory of being a radical feminist. If someone is right-wing, or even just a centrist liberal feminist, then they're just an ordinary transphobe, not a TERF.
While you may be right by academic classification, most TERF studies I've seen and most notable TERF accounts on X are almost exclusively far right-wing, because it is an inherently conservative stance even if the grounding starting position is more socially progressive.
TERFs outed themselves as exclusionary. As such, they can't be left wing, even if they would like to align with it on some other principles. You can't be humanistic only towards some humans.
We're "exclusionary" in the sense that we want males be excluded from spaces intended for women and girls, yes. This is entirely compatible with left-wing political views.
An optimistic explanation is that they don't want to be antisemitic. The present-day term for "Pharisee" is "Jew." The early rabbis who created Judaism as we know it were Pharisees, and theirs was the only first-century Jewish sect which survived until today. You can even see the alternation between "Pharisee" and "Jew" in The New Testament. For instance, in some verses it criticizes the Pharisees for washing their hands before eating, whereas in others it levies the same complaint against Jews generally: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke%2011%3A38%...
In the schools I'm familiar with, this isn't really a skill that's taught. The emphasis is on carrying out steps correctly on paper. Making a good estimate without showing work would definitely be frowned upon.
In Germany this was part of the physics curriculum.
It made sense since order-of-magnitude estimations constantly come up naturally in all fields of physics, whether you are asking "is this plausibly possible", "what kind of instrument do I need for this measurement" (and later "can we even measure this in this setup") or "are the results of my experiment plausible". There's a reason we joke that to the physicist g=10 and pi=3.
It's difficult to test this kind of thinking in a written test without turning it into something entirely different, but not everything in school has to be on a test. Typically half of our marks were made up from classroom participation.
Taking the steps multiple times (practicing) will make it fast and trustful.
Guessing may get you a part of the way if you're very good at it, but repeatability is what really hammers it into you. It also gets you out of trouble when for any reason your guessing instinct is not at full steam (when tired or otherwise incapacitated, anxious, etc) since you can usually relatively quickly rely on the steps you have drilled for.
> pretty loyal Pokemon fans despite being in their 30's
Pokémon is 28 years old, so people now in their 30s would have been the core demographic of Pokémon fans at the start. I would expect them to be the most loyal fans, no "despite" needed.
> How is this any different than Digimon?
The criticism I've seen is of specific creature designs that look very close to those of specific Pokémon. I don't particularly care about that either – but the criticism is not just that it's another mon collection game.
Games certainly have social value, but I'm not convinced that better graphics contribute all that much. I've not played Factorio, but looking at screenshots it seems not to have particularly advanced graphics. Indeed, I still get a lot of enjoyment out of 20-year-old games and often wish that modern games had less sophisticated graphics so they would run better.
To some extent, graphics are important because with extremely primitive graphics, like the graphics of the NES, it can get difficult to tell what things are represented by the image, and the limited color palette presents a challenge in making the game look aesthetically pleasing.
A game doesn't need the most advanced graphics to look aesthetically pleasing, though. It can be made up for by using an art style that doesn't need powerful hardware, e.g. modern pixel art, or the simplistic, cartoonish look that 3D Nintendo games use. Mirror's Edge still looks great due to its art direction and use of techniques like precomputed lighting.
However, different people have different standards. I've been really enjoying playing the game Crypt of the Necrodancer, and I think the pixel art is also pretty good and aesthetically pleasing, but when I showed the game to my friend to see if he might like it, he rejected it because "the art didn't speak to him." Evidently, compared to me, he has a higher minimum for graphics in order for a game to be fun for him.
You must mean hundreds or thousands, right? Modern homo-sapiens are not hundreds of thousands of years old.
> Have you read the Quran? Reading it is essential to understanding Muslims and their faith. It is first and foremost an anti-christian book, and the faith is foremost anti-christian. Just as christendom at one time was foremost anti-pagan.
I've only read parts of the Quran in translation, and I wouldn't say that I understand it that well. It's not organized in a narrative structure like the bible, and there are a lot of parts that are impossible to understand without outside knowledge, like a surah that condemns Abu Lahab but doesn't explain who he was [1]. The Quran is not really the sort of book that you can just read on its own without guidance and expect to understand.
So, with the preface that you should take what I have to say about the Quran with a grain of salt, I'm not sure how you could take away that it's primarily an anti-Christian text. Yes, it criticizes Christians and Jews a lot, but it also has good things to say about them. For example:
"Indeed, the believers, Jews, Christians, and Sabians—whoever truly believes in Allah and the Last Day and does good will have their reward with their Lord. And there will be no fear for them, nor will they grieve." [2]
The main villains of the Quran are polytheists (like Abu Lahab). It talks about them a lot more and never has anything good to say [3]. By contrast, the New Testament barely even mentions polytheists or pagans – most of its criticism is directed against Jews.
Muslims traditionally believe that Jesus was the messiah, that he was born of a virgin, that he performed miracles, and that he's going to return and rule the world in a future era [4]. It's also said that Muhammad was identified as a prophet by a Christian monk named Bahira [5]. Early on, Orthodox Christians identified Islam as a heretical form of Christianity, not a different religion [6]. These do not seem like traits of a religion that is foremost anti-Christian.
[1] https://quran.com/111
[2] https://quran.com/2/62
[3] https://quran.com/search?query=polytheist
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_in_Islam
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bahira
[6] https://archive.org/details/johnofdamascuson0000saha