The Nehor

So you decided to go with a misogynistic take when coming up with an example of what is wrong with the justice system. Classy. Very classy.

This was state government trying to coerce local government to shut down an event because flying the anti-Muslim flag appeals to many in Texas. This was a rental for an exclusive event. It had been happening for years. Usually in such agreements the organizer that rents the facility decides who can attend. For example a company might rent such a venue for an event and invite only employees and their families or a private club could do the same or whatever. The governor is trying to intimidate local governments and to wave the anti-Muslim flag. They just noticed this event this year. Why? *cough* election year *cough* Also the flyer removed the “Muslims only” flyers and just had the dress code and yet the state continued to threaten to pull funding. I posit that a Southern Baptist group doing the same thing and having a “Christians Only” flyer would have gone unnoticed or, if it were noticed, would have quietly removed the “Christians Only” bit and then been ignored. The Texas state government is actively trying to make “undesirables” know how unwelcome they are. Several of my friends have moved away due to this. This is not a bug to our leadership. It is a feature.

This very much assumes that the justice system will somehow inevitably do the right thing and reach the right conclusion.

The water allocation system needs to be revisited. It was built on best-case estimates that aren’t sustainable but it is political suicide to try to change anything to fix the problem.

If I were the judge and got a letter like this I would discount it as worthless. There is a weird dichotomy where many people imagine that people that do horrible things are some kind of ‘breed apart’ from the rest of society and they are obvious. That they imagine that not drinking alcohol and coffee and tea and doing a good job in a volunteer position and paying tithing is somehow proof that someone is no danger when they have child porn is just silly. I have seen a lot of people (in and out of the church) who will talk about how pedophilia and rape and embezzlement and the like are horrible crimes but as soon as someone they like or are close to is caught doing it the excuses start coming out. There is a kind of invisible line where criminal is a designation for a type of person, usually a member of an outgroup. Crimes done by people in the ingroup are anomalies whereas crimes by the outgroup are to be expected and even anticipated. Criminal becomes a label for a type of person and becomes unrelated to whether the person is actually committing crimes.

Yes, I was being deeply serious about that and was definitely suggesting this would be the literal fulfillment of prophecy so thanks for correcting me before I got it wrong and found myself damned for all eternity.

Then a stone is cut out of the mountain without hands (maybe Lincoln’s eye?) and smashes the gold head? I could get behind this.

He already won the prestigious FIFA peace prize. We wouldn’t want him to develop an ego problem.

Charles was pressured into marrying Diana. He couldn’t marry Camilla (who he was already involved with) because she was married. Even if she divorced that might not have cleared the way for a marriage. It was a sin in the Church of England to marry a divorced person when their ex was still living. This also bit Princess Margaret hard when she wanted to marry a divorced man and was denied and then there was Edward VIII who abdicated so he could marry a woman who had been divorced once and was divorcing a second husband at the time. Edward VIII not keeping the throne was probably for the best. Edward was more than a little pro-Nazi and spoke favorably of Hitler. There were all kinds of shenanigans during the war by the Nazis to ‘acquire’ him and Churchill spent a fair amount of effort getting the idiot back onto British soil where he could be protected. If the Germans acquired him they would probably declare him the legitimate monarch to attempt to stir up his supporters in England to turn against the government. Saying the Royals are frugal is……yeah, not really a thing. They don’t live as ostentatiously as some of the ultra-rich do but they are very well off. Queen Elizabeth did work really hard. That has not always been true of the monarch or the royal family in general. There is also a common claim that the Royals bring more in tourist income than they cost but that is based on things like people touring the Tower of London and the like. They could still do that if there were no monarchy. Charles and Diana had a whirlwind romance and she was of the right stock and fit in pretty well with the family at first but that didn’t last. Diana wasn’t ready to live under that kind of a microscope. Charles was still seeing Camilla and Diana had a lot of lovers.

Cool, I have no idea what this is supposed to mean and am probably marginally happier not knowing.

He doesn’t troll. He floats ideas he likes and claims he was “joking” if he gets too much pushback.

Meh, this might be perverted work but I much more strangely perverted things in other areas of my life so this is mild by comparison. Or it is the semi-coded ranting of a very angry Christian writing a revenge fantasy about God torturing for eternity those who hurt the Saints that barely got into the New Testament due to some weird shenanigans.

Warlords of Order, Hellknights of Heaven, Slaves of the Most High, Masters of the Universe, Lords of Light, The Iron Pathfinders.

Cute, not sure why “Federation” would be a starting point but I guess they are in the “no bad ideas” stage of brainstorming. Also the obsession with swords is pretty typical. When Nephi finds Laban drunk in the street the first thing he mentions is how neat and amazing the sword is. Typical teenage behavior.

I don’t think it ensured that but it might have been an attempt to tell people that it is wrong to kill people in your tribe or group.

The de facto bit is correct. The de jure bit would need to be shown. There generally aren’t bathroom usage laws on the books. So I would question whether that is de jure or just an assumed custom.

I don’t find the whole internal consistency of the Book of Mormon being mostly maintained to be that impressive. It is not a super complex story. There are usually about half a dozen important people on the stage at once and often less and they are usually only doing big things with their time. It is not the Silmarillion where you need to regularly check the appendices to see where this character fits into the genealogy or a novel where the events of a person’s life are included in a lot of detail to where you would need This isn’t a problem for authenticity itself. Winnowing things down to a few key characters is what you might expect from a super abridged history but it doesn’t impress me much that someone could avoid contradictions and plot holes in a simple narrative. There are a few plot holes in the Book of Mormon but it might just be stuff Mormon decided not to include. Edit: Accidentally posted before done. I think of historical events and they are chock full of a lot of characters that enter and exit and sometimes reenter and how complex events can be. In the pre-Mosiah narrative it is about Lehi and family and then is pretty much a history with one person each. In Mosiah and Alma the narrative tends to follow the king, maybe some children, and the High Priest and sometimes his traveling companion and maybe some children. Then it is just descendants for the most part except for the military section where a lot of names show up but there are really just four Nephite commanders of note and the Lamanites have their monarch and that is it. I was reading a bit about some shenanigans in the Roman Republic and there are dozens of characters holding various offices involved along with some senators. It is complex as the writer tries to tie the sources together and give the best understanding of what happened. The Book of Mormon narrative doesn’t really have these kinds of events in there and when things of this nature do happen it is usually summarized in a few sentences.

You do realize they don’t DNA test infants at birth to determine if they have XX or XY chromosomes right? I might have XX chromosomes with one of various abnormalities that made me develop as male. That might be the case for you too. Many never find out unless they are testing for potential problems with fertility or the like. Many die not knowing they have XX chromosomes. Your neat gender binary doesn’t work.

I keep saying there doesn’t need to be a “limiting” principle because we don’t need a law about this. There wasn’t one before. No limiting principle needed. Not everything needs to be legislated. No. For transphobes yes. Okay, then do that. What clear, objective boundary. Transwomen and transmen have been using public restrooms for decades. Why did it suddenly become a problem? I’ll answer that. Fearmongering about hypotheticals. And most of them were done by cishet men who never claimed to be transgender so what would change to make them stop. Maybe we should tackle “rape culture” instead and leave trans people alone? You know, deal with the group with the most actual abusers instead of humiliating and trying to control people who might hypothetically be dangerous. I remember how upset you got with the idea that women might think you are an abuser just because you are a man and how unfair that was even though the group you are in was the most likely to contain that kind of abuser. Yet you want to police other innocent people and treat them as potential abusers because it might make people in another group find it slightly harder to be creepy and pervy? Especially since transgender people (especially transwomen) are often pursued by creepy men. All the time. They are called “chasers”. It is victim-blamey. Transgender people don’t want to be collateral due to this really weird blame shifting from the perpetrators to people that people imagine somehow passively empower perpetrators when they don’t. Creeps are creepy whether transgender people exist or not. It doesn’t matter what you are trying to do. It matters what you are actually doing. And you are throwing people to the wolves under the pretext that it might make other people not be creepy and weird? Separate but equal hasn’t worked that well in the past. I like the idea of single-use options but restricting certain people to only those options when others are available would likely be very discriminatory. At a queer meet-up space I go to there are only single-use options and they replaced the normal gender signs with pictures of things like aliens, dragons, robots, and unicorns. I would like that to be the case everywhere.

I don’t think anyone really likes these terms. They are clunky and not entirely accurate but no better term has caught on. Typically in discussions it is “biologically female” and not “biological woman”. If you mean “does not include all trans men” then yes. Some trans men were born intersex. Do you have a better term?

The one thing I found laughable in the linked articles is this bit: Yeah, no, just no. If Joseph Smith hade somehow won the Presidency he would not have averted the Civil War. The secession of the southern states started because Lincoln’s election meant that the expansion of slavery into the west of the United States was likely dead and that was intolerable to the people of the South. The idea that a President could take office on the platform of freeing all the slaves and not immediately trigger a conflict is just historically naive. I applaud the idea Joseph Smith put forth but it wasn’t practical and wouldn’t have averted the conflict. The idea that southern slaveowners were primarily concerned that they wouldn’t get any money for freed slaves but were fine with them being freed in general is just not how anything would have worked. Had Lincoln run on the platform of manumitting all the slaves in the south it would have triggered secession even faster if he had won. Lincoln also likely would not have won if he ran on that platform. The majority of the people of the North were antislavery before the war but were not abolitionists. During the war the Union (and particularly the Union Army) became very pro-abolition. John Brown was thought of as a dangerous terrorist before the war but by the middle of the war John Brown was a popular rallying cry. Here is one popular Union Army marching song: Now that is an amazing hymn.

The only person I know who gets away with this is a history blogger I know who launches a three part series on a topic and then finds he has to divide it up even more as there is too much to say so he leans into it with intros like: “This is part 7 of our 4 part discussion of….” It doesn’t work as well when used about a book that is published all at once.

it is clunky much like AMAB and AFAB are clunky. But in this context saying biological women includes transmen. Using the term “cis” is a simple identifier good for use when distinctions are important even if it is clunkier than people like.

I wouldn’t hold out much hope for an exact location to be identified in some text. Also the ancient world had very few maps. Distances were known primarily by how many days travel it is from A to B. An overhead view of the world was rarely considered or visualized.