that’s certainly a take that most secular scholars of early christianity would disagree with but do you

The conflict of interest here is pretty obvious, and if anybody was suckered into believing this guy’s prognostications on his company’s products perhaps they should work on being less credulous.

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bullshit. You’re just intellectualizing being a creep.

How, exactly, does having empathy lead to toleration of unempathetic ideologies like fascism? It logically would make us even more averse to those kinds of ideas. Dare I say, a dearth of empathy on a societal level leads directly to those places.

What a reductive and unnuanced view of the world. I sure hope you are not representative of the rest of the population or we are even more fucked than I thought.

the problem is that he was wrong; Empathy is a good thing. You are embodying his shitty ideology by not having empathy. That doesn’t mean you gotta suddenly like the guy or not call out his shitty ideology, but don’t let yourself get dragged down into the septic tank and get covered in the shit.

I’ll gladly die on this hill, get at me nerds

I’m super not stoked on this event, I know that makes me a big softy or whatever but I’m not gonna be the one celebrating blood and death and mayhem regardless of who it is…BUT Charlie Kirk is was one of the leading big mouths pushing political discourse to this point. He’s been helping fill the tinderbox and somebody just dropped a lit match into his lap.

I just hope to God they don’t try to spin this into a store-brand Reichstag Fire moment since they can’t get any big reaction from the Nat’l Guard presence.

his book on propaganda, The Formation of Men’s Attitudes, is also well worth a read.

I think his ideas on concentration camps/prison camps slot in nicely with Deleuze’s ideas about Control Societies and the ways that technology is being used to extend the Foucaultian ideas of discrete enclosures to never-ending enclosures in all aspects of life.

And, if you like Ellul, you should definitely check out Ivan Illich’s work. He’s another social critic coming from a heterodox Christian perspective (Catholic in this case). His ideas can seem a bit unintuitive at and even off-putting to modern sensibilities at times (especially his idea of Life as Idol and his critique of modern medicine in general) but he’s another guy with a lot going on that has been pretty accurate in his prognosticating of contemporary society.

many mid-20th century French thinkers like Foucault, Debord, Deleuze and Baudrillard spent a lot of time writing about surveillance and technology. Lots of this stuff has turned out to be extremely prescient. (Ellul is another example, but as a Christian Anarchist his critiques of what he called the Technical Society, are a bit of an outlier from the other guys above who, despite a plurality of ideas and perspectives, were all coming from a pretty similar place wrt their philosophical backgrounds)

A pretty easy to digest example is Deleuze’s “Postscript on Societies of Control”, which is like 5 pages long and available for free online, written ca 1990 that is pretty spooky in how accurately it predicted the current state of affairs.

The real king here is Baudrillard but his writing isn’t always the most accessible

there’s a lot of mid-century French theorists spinning in their graves right now

IRC continues to demonstrate the superiority of protocols over platforms. Unfortunately, the modern internet is entirely dominated by centralized platforms and that doesn’t seem to be changing anytime soon.

is there currently any work being done to do that though? It’s great that that is possible but if nobody is doing it, it’s only a cute hypothetical.

the only thing more aggravating than using imperial is having to listen to all the complaining about how metric is better. We get it, bro; it’s out of our control at this point

but now you can use the magic words that get the morons in the executive suites all hot and bothered

the next big industry in software is fixing shitty AI code, screen this