I don’t know. I’ve seen a few examples of women who have radically changed their facial photographic representation via skillful application of cosmetics.

I don’t know what to do with that. On one hand, society expects them to use available techniques to change their appearance to meet standards of beauty very few can ever accomplish. Otoh, it’s dishonest because irl they’re not who they seem to be, so an app that shows them without makeup might be useful. But the catch-22 is that the app may not be right, or that we judge too harshly based on an unattainable standard.

Man, Beauty is fucked up in the West. CGI, photoshop, photo manipulation have destroyed reality in favor of manipulating what desirability is.

I offered my informal CV. Lemmy and the Fediverse the largest group I’ve ever offered any service to. My largest group is just over 1,800, but it’s a relatively homogeneous group needing little mod activity. The commuinity is free to comment on my history, stupidity (lol) and bias. I figure it’s fair considering he job app. I’ll offer that I respect and enjoy (even if it’s verbal sparring) the prospect of opposing reasonable views on Lemmy vs the bots, tropes, reposts, and crabs-in-a-bucket karma-whores on Reddit.

You said:

An interesting thing about what we have now in Christianity though is that it basically spawned as-is in the first century

The article says:

Little is fully known of Christianity in its first 150 years; sources are few.

So you’re making a huge, sweeping statement that Christianity as we know it today is based on something…we don’t know much about? There are 6 major Christian denominations, not to mention hundreds of smaller ones. Which one is the “as-is” one? The one that is exactly “as-is” from CE 100?

That’s the problem though. They want none of their pennies to go to anyone else for anything. Loosely they might pay for someone else’s whatever if it’s their choice, or maybe if there’s groveling involved. They use mental excuses like “someone that’s lazy, doesn’t meet my made-up standards, doesn’t look, speak, or think like me”… or any other metric by which they subjectively view others to judge whether or not those others get their money. Yet somehow they expect roads, water, schools and all the other services that keep their town and state to miraculously keep functioning and not look like a decrepit village on a dirt road in a destitute nation.

You mean besides a couple dudes running around telling us to be cool to each other?

You didn’t even read the wiki entry, did you.

It also doesn’t take into account rising property taxes, business tax, rising maintenance costs. I’m not arguing in favor of these dirty landlord companies that jack up the rent at every opportunity, however you’d have to control interest rates and the ridiculous home prices if you want to keep rents reasonable based on a percentage of mortgage costs.

I think profit and power, or the lack thereof, can be the root of a lot of these awful human traits. It can just be straight up greed driven by a few looking to gain power and/or money that push an agenda of [insert tried and true bogeymen here like xenophobia, religion, racism, etc.] to create motives and instabity to trigger the wars. It could be genuine problems like economic issues or severe agricultural deficiency, via real misfortune or more likely due to greed, corruption, and mismanagement by the country’s leadership. Even religion can be the rationalization, a tit-for-tat, but nonetheless the end result is to take that the enemy has. It doesn’t have to be formalized markets or capitalism.

It can both be about profit and genocide. They can exist at the same time. IOW, genocide can be profitable.

The former president has claimed the criminal charges against him will appeal to Black voters. In February, he told a group of Black conservatives that his indictments are “why the Black people like me.”

Holy hell…could he be more insulting? “They’re all crooks so they’ll like me because I’m a crook like them”.

Oh, they’ve lightly retconned it to mean “I’m persecuted for false charges like them” but that’s not what he said on the first go around. And he did exactly to the black community what he says they should relate to him for when he went after the Central Park Five.

I think “as-is” is a bit of a stretch.

No.

There’s lots of ambiguous information. There is no firsthand, historically agreed upon data that supports his existence in the form we know him today. In other words, there was no magical guy doing magical things.

There is no Roman record of “nailed 3 prisoners to the posts today; Bill, Roger, and Jesus the magic guy who was a pain in the ass.”

However, like Arthurian Legend, it doesn’t mean some guy like Jesus didn’t exist, or an aggregate of characters weren’t assembled to be him on story. Arthur was possibly just a chieftain of a group who fought a couple of hefty battles and made a name for himself, but he ended up being an almost magical figure with wizards and witches in the story and - guess what, he will “rise again” from the dead when needed. And no, rising from the dead isn’t owned by Christian religious figures, Osiris of Egypt did it, Dionysius of the Greek Pantheon among many others. So maybe some dude, who probably wasn’t named Jesus, caused a stir and got a few people to take note. That grew over hundreds and even thousands of years to what we have now.

Want to know why King Arthur isn’t a competitor to Jesus? He a) doesn’t offer the opportunity to control people in this life for the hope of an afterlife, b) he isn’t profitable.

The time after the meeting is spent not wanting to engage in tasks you can’t accomplish before end of day, and watching the clock knowing the meeting screwed up the day.

What constitutes “mysterious” when it comes to a billionaire? Common people usually don’t have particularly creative or unusual modes of death. We going to find him strapped to the outside of a Falcon 9 booster like some James Bond-esque supervillain’s assasination attempt of Musk, the Main Character?

That’s history. The ones with the means hoard anything of value while blaming the commons for their problems. Doesn’t matter if it’s the Irish Potato Famine or telling us global warming is our fault because we didn’t buy enough greenwashed shit to fix it.

Here I was thinking maybe I’d throw them a bone, maybe they were trying to be decent people that his public image and association made life difficult for them. No. Of course not. They just wanted his fame to bring them money. They are who they are.

Just like all the people who do shitty things that suddenly throw Christianity at you as a defense of their character, or find god, or some other equally self-serving lies.

I understand there’s a right way to do it, but allow me to assure that the two murky trays behind this bar were not acceptable by any means. I didn’t want to get too graphic, but glasses went from the customer hand, a quick slosh and a rub in liquids that would make any civilized health department shriek, wiped “dry” with a filthy rag that had just wiped the bar top, filled with the next drink and handed to the next customer.

This is the kind of stuff where you see it in a movie like so: the scoundrel hero walks into a dive bar in the spaceport, orders a drink, the camera makes sure you see the pustulent, greasy alien clean the vessel using the above process. The alien pours a questionable liquid into it, and slides it to the observing hero who has been keeping a stone-faced expression but for a hint of discomposure as he receives the drink. After the briefest pause in frame to let you know he questions what he is about to do, he downs the beverage. You can’t help but cringe along with the hero and think licking the alien might have been safer.

(Am not comparing or suggesting Montenegrins are in any way shape or form like the hypothetical alien)

Repeatedly? Unapologetically? Will continue to do so for personal gain? Apparently all the republicans are thieves literally trying to steal an election, murderers (running over protesters? Letting people drown at the border? Sooting people for pulling into the wrong driveway or knocking on the wrong door?), engaging in idolatry of the Republican Party and the flag, telling lies about their lgbtq and minority neighbors how they’re all rapists and muderers, putting kids and everyone else to work 7 days a week to keep Supply Side Jesus happy…

I dunno about honoring the father and mother? Keeping the racism, generational trauma, and subjugated woman themes going just like Mom and Dad?

Covet? Dunno what to do with that one…maybe the fact that others have rights, slowly escalating equality, and relief from burdens like student loans or hunger by free school lunches. The republicans want to take it all away.

The conservative Ten Commandments.

It’s like shitty hypnosis, except they eat it up without the excuse of being hypnotized.

This was my thought. DNA isn’t stable so it’s a lousy storage medium. Degrades over time, mutations in living organisms, etc.