Not minimalist enough: it actually runs NetBSD.

But then again, what’s the purpose of being alive?

Apparently dragging people from peaceful nonexistence into existence without their consent so that during their lifetime they will endure a lot of suffering, admittedly experiencing some transient joys along the way but doomed to one day have to undergo the agony of getting sick and dying, after which everything that happened during their life will have been meaningless, given that one day (in the near or far future) there will be no humans left and so even how their life affected other people will have been for naught?

I mean, that does not seem like a great life purpose to me, but you do you I guess?

My interpretation of this comic was that it is making fun of the parts of having a kid that they don’t tell you about, not that it was being judgemental towards anyone.

Sure, it is being hyperbolic, but hyperbole is common feature of humor.

I mean, they only have the power to do these things because we actively give it to them, so if we just stopped doing that then we would not need to also chop off their heads.

When I am talking with them, I want to feel like I am having a conversation with ChatGPT.

Apparently not quite! It looks like you would mostly be stepping back and forth between UTC and its opposite.

Given that time zones are essentially set by the local research stations, I conclude that Chile and Argentina would win the war because their time zone has the most coastland and so they would have the most penguins on their side.

They would all lose because they stretch all the way down into Antarctica which means that the penguins would be involved…

I think that the implication was that they would have to sell in order to come up with the cash to pay the tax?

Hey, at least you tried! 😉

(And don’t think too harshly of the other poster; we were all 14 once, after all!)

EDIT: Hahaha, instant downvote!

For the record, the downvote was from me, and it was because you are being an ass.

All evidence points to a jew who, under roman occupation, organized a political and religious movement around his person with a message so powerful that it immediately started replicating. Otherwise, how can we explain the sudden outflow of missionaries from Galilee ? Whose message were they spreading, which travelled as far as Asia and Ethiopia with relative unity and consistence ? What reason do we have to doubt that a revolutionary mystical prophet such as Jesus existed (they were legion at the time in that region), and why should we subscribe to some more exotic, laborious explaination ?

I think that it is worth noting that the person who did most of the successful evangelizing in the beginning that led to the explosion of the movement was actually Paul, who had his own message that wasn’t quite the same as Jesus’s apostles–in fact, he started spreading the message without talking to them first because he figured that he already knew everything that he needed to know, which led to conflict that required Acts to work really hard to make it seem like they were all on the same side all along.

But regardless, it is peculiar that people seem to think that starting a widely successful cult is a particularly hard thing to do if the founder has enough charisma (and luck), given that all you have to do is look around at the numerous modern examples. For example, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness was founded in 1966 by a guy banging drums in New York, and has since grown into a huge movement with hundreds of dedicated temples. So it is far more plausible that this is what happened in the case of Christianity than that some other more complicated process synthesizing the existence of a fake founder.

It must be very convenient to be able to declare victory in a discussion without hanging to present an actual argument. 😉

Poor thing must have accidentally made it with the shiny side facing in instead of out…

You are thinking about this the wrong way. From the scraps of information that we do have, which includes volumes of work by Jesus’s followers, there are two extremes one could take: we know absolutely nothing about Jesus or whether he even existed, or we know absolutely everything about Jesus. I agree that the later extreme is wrongheaded, but surely treating it as a binary choice so that the only other possibility is that we can say nothing at all about Jesus is also wrongheaded.

You might argue reasonably, of course, that his followers cannot be trusted, so we can learn nothing from their writings. This is not true, however, because if nothing else we can learn from the editorial choices that they made; for example, when a Gospel goes out of is way to explain a detail that would have been embarrassing to contemporaries, this actually provides potential evidence that this detail was true and widely known at the time so that it needed to be explained, because otherwise it would just have been left out.

At the end of the day, scholarship is essentially about weighing probabilities rather than certainties, and good scholars do not pretend otherwise.

Keep in mind that most likely the historical Jesus was just one of many apocalyptic preachers going around telling people that, within the lifetime of some present, God was going to come down and vanquish evil once and for all, so one had better be prepared and be on God’s good side when this happened. (Incidentally, the Romans probably could not have cared less about this; it was when they got word that he was claiming to be an earthly king–which may have been how Judas actually betrayed him–that they got seriously pissed and executed him because they had a zero tolerance policy for that kind of thing.)

You can see imminent apocalypse theme in the epistles where John Paul writes that there is no real point making big life changes like getting married since the world is going to end any day; amusingly, when this did not happen, they needed to start coming up with alternative policies, and so other letters start to set down rules which thematically contradict the earlier letters, but it turns out that there are other things about these letters that make them different too so I’m many cases they are considered to be forgeries. (Obviously this is an oversimplification of the academic research!)

(Also, it’s also worth noting that John Paul and the apostles had really different notions of what Jesus was all about, and part of the whole point of Acts is to paper over these differences and make it seem like they had all been past of one team all along.)

Finally, it is worth pointing out that there were a lot of texts floating around in the same genre as Revelation, so it was not all that unique and it almost did not make it’s way into the Bible, but the Church Fathers thought incorrectly that the John who wrote it was the same as the author of the Gospel of John; if they had known that these were two different Johns, then the Left Behind series would never have been written (amount other consequences).

So in conclusion, be very wary of trying to read a lot of significance into the New Testament as a whole because it was not a unified document written with single purpose.

Edit: Gah! I wrote John above when I meant Paul. How embarrassing!

You misspelled GNURU.

It would not be giving D.C. too much power because ultimately Congress governs D.C., not the local government which exists entirely at Congress’s pleasure, so this would at least give D.C. some influence over its own government rather than none, which is what it currently has.

My interpretation of the comic is that he had not done these things until after she had yelled at him, making him realize that the situation was really bad and he needed to take it over from her. Arguably he should have come to this realization sooner, but we all occasionally fail to see what is in front of us time to time, so I am willing to cut him slack given that he immediately jumped in without being asked once it became clear he was needed.

A lot of the people I regularly interact with are at a contra dancing venue. Does that not count as a community because I have to drive to interact with them instead of walking? (Genuine question; not intended as a gotcha.)

Also, keep in mind that my original comment to @[email protected] was responding to the following,

We have spurned community because it’s more tempting to hide inside and feel miserable and lonely. Losing community was how we lost civics and representation and basic human empathy. [emphasis mine]

Gah, it is not hard for me to talk to strangers! It just burns through energy.

In particular, I have never had much trouble talking to strangers with my full empathy turned on. It gets a bit tricky when I don’t actually care about what they are talking about, but I have a couple of abilities that help with this. First, I generally care about the person and making sure that they feel valued, regardless of what they are saying. Second, I have a mild form of bipolar so I am used to having raging emotions underneath the surface that are disconnected from the situation at hand and needing to regulate them, so I can keep up an expression of interest–and again, I am generally genuinely interested in the person–even while feeling very restless underneath. In fact, I have been so successful at this that in the past a couple of conversations with strangers have led to them asking me out, despite the fact that we were both men and I am not gay.

Again, though, all of this burns through energy. So the difficulty has nothing to do with me lacking a skill but more like being exhausted from having done hard physical labor all day, and then having a random person demand that you drop and do pushups or else they will declare that you are not trying hard enough.