What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.

"Then He will also say to those on His left, ‘Depart from Me, accursed ones, into the eternal fire which has been prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry, and you gave Me nothing to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave Me nothing to drink; I was a stranger, and you did not invite Me in; naked, and you did not clothe Me; sick, and in prison, and you did not visit Me.’

Then they themselves also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see You hungry, or thirsty, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not take care of You?’ Then He will answer them, ‘Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to Me.’ These will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”

I have always loved how simply Jesus spells it out.

As a kid, I always felt it was so implausible that the Jews would kill Jesus. Yes he claims to be God, which is a no-no, but how can a message of peace and love be so divisive? As an adult, I've come to realize that it's divisive to people who are angry and filled with hate, to people who hate peace and love. The Pharisees of 30CE are the exact same as most Christians today. If you walked in to some Trump country Baptist church today and flipped over the collection plates and told everyone there they were going to hell because the want to deport immigrants instead of help them, you'd be shot for sure.

They're right though. This was the plan. Hard to do market manipulation without manipulating the market.

Is it surprising that the people who thought Mexico would pay for a border wall also don't understand how tariffs work?

Same, but when I began really looking at it and trying to overcome it, I found it's a very universal experience, certainly not divided by gender.

When you look at these odd archetypes of what people want out of the ideal man or woman, they all share the same core. Strong, independent, doesn't need help, doesn't want help. The individualistic experience is such a sad, lonely, miserable, experience. They want to be able to go it alone, but in hundreds of thousands of years of truly human existence, going it alone is such an exception. Our weights and burdens and lives are meant to be shared. They always have been and always will be.

For example, I have a 4 year old son who has been infatuated with ballet for a couple months now. There are dads today who are beating their sons for liking ballet. It's terrible. But it's not that ballet is "queer" or that men don't do ballet. There are plenty of men who are queer. There are plenty of men who do ballet. But, I don't do ballet. If I beat my son, it's because I am making it about myself. I don't want a son who does ballet. That is as narcissistic and individualistic as it gets.

That's not to say that it's not toxic masculinity, just that the toxic masculinity is narcissism in a trench coat.

I have two.

There is no such thing as toxic masculinity or toxic femininity. There is only toxic individualism.

Sometimes, you shouldn't be yourself. The person you are might be awful. Bullying and societal pressure correcting you to a norm can be a good thing.

This just in: man who despises empathy struggles to walk a mile in someone else's shoes.

Yeah, but the second something juicy happens, we all scroll back and get caught up pretty quickly.

Very true. His donors apply pressure all the time!

I always weigh my pasta. A really large serving of pasta is ~4oz.

They say things like this because their base wants to kill people they dislike. Most people don't want to kill people they dislike, they want them to win three Guinness World Records for longest lasting, least operable, and largest hemorrhoids.

Do you think there's a 13 year old girl in Gaza who is writing a diary that will be widely read by children across the world 40-50 years from now?

Elon Musk is 3 beers away from cornering his most attractive niece at Thanksgiving and lecturing her for 38 minutes about how Lincoln started the "War of Northern Aggression."

I might be wrong here, but tariffs can be very effective tools, but as a slow burn. The way they're being wielded here is asinine.

If you want to affect behavior, tariffs are a long game. They're passed by Congress so they aren't tied to the whims of one man. If you don't want US chicken or EU trucks, make a law and let decades of implementation change behavior.

If you just want them to hurt, you do them the way we are now. The unpredictability hurts businesses and individuals, inside and outside the US. It makes prices and markets volatile and sows distrust. It hurts the vast majority of people, but benefits people who have the stability and assets to buy low and sell high. Each tariff implementation and retraction is just a mini market manipulation giving people with advance knowledge of what is affected to profit.

Friendly reminder that company towns and company scrips are the industrial revolution's take on micro transactions.

I feel like someone will be screaming at me in three years because I'll be unhappy that Liz Cheney is the Democratic nominee. It'll be the lesser of two evils, maybe.

I think it is the city in the US with the highest percentage of Arab Americans. But also maybe there's a bit of oil there.

You seem to be mentioning right wing grifters a lot in this thread. What exactly do they do that upsets you so badly?

Every foreign dignitary who visits the White House should wear a tan suit just for fun.

I feel like saying it's normal for empires to fall due to external causes is not accurate? It's usually the exception. Maybe the external factor is the final kick, knocking over a rotting house of cards, but the cause is almost always division, internal conflict, or unsustainable growth. An empire is much more likely to collapse under its own weight than it is to have Alexander the Great kick its teeth in. The Ottoman Empire was called "The Sick Man of Europe" for a reason.