“But all we did is wholesale adopt an intrinsically selfish ideology that legitimised plundering natural resources and public infrastructure to enrich a handful of spivs and make us temporarily fat on the crumbs left over thus creating a world where our grandchildren starve and are powerless...”
“Some of us didn’t even…

And being a prostitute in her formative years must’ve taken a toll; even if one of her Johns’ managed to pull her out of the gutter by cutting her into a get-rich-quick stock-trading / revenge scam.

Couldn’t agree more. Throughout his entire career there’s maybe two or three vaguely catchy tunes, and even those are vacuous doggerel. Good luck getting one musical you can sit through out of his entire catalogue. Hell, good luck finding one song that is good from start to finish while we’re looking at his uneven…

Not a coffee* shop? Hike up the premium of just-a-drink, and put up plenty of promotional materials celebrating your great “coffee* and a sandwich bundle!” which folds your current cost of coffee* into it.

Print up some limited-time discount-cards for “just a coffee*” that bring the cost of your coffee*s down to your…

If you look at similar stuff that never made it into the final film, you see just how much guff Lucas crammed into the film, and how little idea he had of where it was going or what it was about.

His peers viewing draft cuts decried his film as “nonsense”.

Not surprising Hamill didn’t have a grasp on Luke, neither did…

So if you happen to be small/have a young face you should just accept that you regularly won’t be allowed to purchase alcohol until well into your 30s? That’s absurd.

Don’t presume to tell me how I’m “thinking” of a congregation; not that it matters either way.

The value isn’t in what the “flock”, “believers”, “patients and guests” were like.
The value is in the mere fact that they bolster the material benefits your religion provides you with: By making its doctrines and praxis seem…

There’s a clear benefit to providing care for your congregation:
It makes them beholden to you;
It bolsters your false claims of divine favour;
It obfuscates all of their tithe money you spend on feathering your own nest.

These are just some of the reasons that stem solely from self-interest. When you consider pragmatic…

I disagree that any good from religion only comes out by coincidence. For example, hospitals exist because Catholics in the middle ages created places to help poor, sick people - almshouses.

You’re confusing the religion - which isn’t valuable on it’s own merit other than as a novelty - with good deeds that don’t require religiousity at all.

It’s pretty much the same sort of magical thinking that makes people religious: People aren’t good because sky-god told them to; and in fact many people do horrible…

No-one’s redefining anything.
The fact that ethnonationalism is fascistic, and vice versa, isn’t something that’s been pulled out of the air as a “gotcha!” - it’s been (historically, at least) hard-baked into the ideologies.

It’s why the phrase “Blut und boden” (Blood and soil) was used in Nazi propaganda: Because the…

Eh, rational people are still subject to cognitive biases - overturning them requires the application of the scientific method, not by just being virtuous.

By the same token, someone can be rational and accept the absurdity of religion, but still be religious by nature, inclination, preference, and practice.
Conversely,…

Fallacy of the beard, I’m afraid.  The line is drawn at whether or not someone is a fascist, not whether or not they have one hair on their face too many or too few to be considered a beard.

“Hey. You should love your neighbor as yourself” that’s a positive moral code to live by. And so what if some people think it was said by a sky-god? It’s still a positive moral code to live by, no matter who said it.”

What you described is literally Antifa.

Ethnonationalism is a predominant feature of fascism. At least in common parlance, it is usually considered to be the defining feature or even a synonym.

Again: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_fascism

The picture of “Salty” at the top is female, the mere presence of that image subconsciously sets up an imagined context and narrative setting for the dialogues.

I am pretty sure that if the picture was of John Cleese serving Mr Creosote or the column was called “The Salty Waiter”, that alone would change the gender…

We live in a world where even Godwin’s had to come out and effectively say “hey, now that there’s actual fascists and neonazis in the mainstream, people shouldn’t be using Godwin’s Law to shut down legitimate criticism.”

Discovering worthwhile truths can be hard and complicated. That’s why the ignorant are so confident in their certitude, and why the wise are circumspect.

The idea that the concept of fascism is meaningless, or nebulous enough to lack any contemporary relevance, is false. Childishly, laughably so.

https://en.wikipedia.org…

What a perverse argument... Ethnonationalism is ok because you speculate that a server in a restaurant isn’t familiar enough with hypothetical foreign dignitaries to condemn them for it?