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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 11th, 2023

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  • Proverbs 28:27

    Those who give to the poor will lack nothing, but those who close their eyes to them receive many curses.

    versus

    Matthew 6:6

    But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.

    But they can’t be expected to actually pay attention to their own scripture.





  • GraniteM@lemmy.worldto196@lemmy.blahaj.zoneRule
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    17 days ago

    Think about being a child with Professor X’s abilities. He can get anything he wants, make anyone believe anything he wants, he can know everyone’s deepest most shameful secrets. How could a person like that even form a moral framework? From his childhood, he’d have every reason to believe that he was immune to all discipline and that rules simply don’t apply to him if he decides they don’t, because for him those are true facts! By all rights Professor X ought to be a an exceptionally dangerous egoist and megalomaniac.

    Oh, also, if there is any Marvel character who ought to be canonically omnisexual, it ought to be Charles. He doesn’t see bodies, he just sees minds. That undersea prawn monster that Namor was making out with ought to be just table stakes for Professor Xavier.


  • If you believe that laws forbidding gambling, sale of liquor, sale of contraceptives, requiring definite closing hours, enforcing the Sabbath, or any such, are necessary to the welfare of your community, that is your right and I do not ask you to surrender your beliefs or give up your efforts to put over such laws. But remember that such laws are, at most, a preliminary step in doing away with the evils they indict. Moral evils can never be solved by anything as easy as passing laws alone. If you aid in passing such laws without bothering to follow through by digging in to the involved questions of sociology, economics, and psychology which underlie the causes of the evils you are gunning for, you will not only fail to correct the evils you sought to prohibit but will create a dozen new evils as well.

    Robert A. Heinlein, Take Back Your Government







  • I have real love for TNG S1E16, “Too Short a Season.”

    The Enterprise is dealing with a hostage crisis on a planet where the local government wants this old admiral who had negotiated a truce there decades before to come back. He shows up and it turns out he’s taking experimental de-aging drugs to grow younger. It turns out that when he had negotiated the original truce before, he had violated the prime directive and given weapons to some rebels, but he told himself that he made it even by giving the same weapons to the other side, which led to decades of bloodshed.

    The writing is just okay, and the old guy / young guy makeup is pretty bad, but the scene where the admiral dies while looking into his wife’s eyes gets me. I also like to imagine that the ep might have originally been written with Kirk in mind as the old guy, because the whole “Well I made it fair by giving weapons to both sides” seems like the kind of cowboy insane shit that Kirk would pull and then never consider the consequences. The episode feels a little bit like it’s revisiting some of the times when Kirk would do his thing and then warp off into the sunset while definitely leaving some loose threads behind.