The Nehor

The current Scots tend to be much more patriotic and devoted to a shared heritage. Projecting this backwards as if it has always been this way is a mistake.

It is more that the local elites among the Scots wanted power and were able to call up their own levies. Those that were levied up likely weren’t burning with anything like patriotic fervor. They were there because of their obligations to whomever was in charge of the area and mostly wanted to survive to be able to go home. The loyalty to their neighbors and friends who they are likely fighting next to can keep them on the battle line because abandoning your friends is shameful. You want to win the battle but not because you think it will make your life better. You want to win because if you win you are more likely to live through it.

They might have disliked them but probably not much more than they disdained the local Scottish lords.

In truth the concept of nationhood is mostly manufactured. Most of the French didn’t consider themselves primarily French until nations formed and things like the printing press and stronger centralized governments created the idea that everyone in France was French. There are some states that are more ethnically homogenous such as North Korea but those states tend (generally speaking) to be a regressive mess. Prior to these moves towards a sense of national identity the bulk of the people didn’t much care who was in charge. The local elites cared a lot because they generally wanted to be in charge but the subsistence farmers didn’t care much if their land was conquered since they would probably be living under generally the same taxation scheme. The movie Braveheart got this very wrong. The normal Scotsman didn’t care whether the locals they paid taxes to were English or Scottish and at the time would have been hard-pressed to see much of a difference. The idea of a national identity also fragments as often as it unites as can be seen in places like the Balkans and Eastern Europe where states were constantly fragmenting, combining, and breaking apart again along mostly ethnic lines. In the ancient Mediterranean world a lot more depended on citizenship. The city of Rome was an ethnic mutt of people who lived in and around the city. The key measure of identity was citizenship. Same with the Greek city-states. In general acquiring citizenship was difficult. In Sparta even keeping citizenship could be hard. Then again Sparta was weird, regressive, and was a pretty horrible place to live unless you liked a life of indolence and were lucky enough to be born into the elite.

President Kimball did eventually call President Benson out and lambasted him for his political obsessions. He held back for a long time though. Elder Benson had all kinds of crazy schemes and several times was angling to be a third-party presidential candidate. He seemed to have an unhealthy fixation on political power. He also had a number of harebrained schemes. This was one of the weirdest:

I’m just emotionally cheating. It is fine.

A well-written blog post on why the United States is not a nation as the word strictly means: https://acoup.blog/2021/07/02/collections-my-country-isnt-a-nation/ Here is a bit of it: That sums it up pretty well. Nationalism in the United States is mostly an appeal to “crude populism and xenophobia”.

That is not what nationalism means. Also you portray a world where going from one country to another is easy and simply a matter of choice. In most of history it was rare to have the option and it still isn’t reasonably possible for most people.

They are. The United States also isn’t actually a nation by the strict definition: “a large body of people united by common descent, history, culture, or language, inhabiting a particular country or territory.” Note that for most nations that common descent and history is mythical. In the United States we rejected that definition. We don’t have a shared history or ancestry. We are not an ethnostate. We took people from all over. Europeans mingled with indigenous people. You are just as much an American if your ancestors stepped off the Mayflower as you are if you are Korean or Nigerian and showed up last year. This inclusiveness was admittedly very limited at first, filled with conflict, and has an ugly history of being ignored or abused but the aspiration was always there to an extent. Nationalism in the United States is a poison. It is pretty much inextricably tied to racism and seeing one ethnic group as predominant. This can be explicit or implicit. There might be a kind of condescending paternalistic attitude to other ethnic groups that accepts those who fit in in the right way all the way to xenophobia. Nationalism will destroy the United States as we know it if it is allowed to thrive. Christian Nationalists in the US want a religious ethnostate and to somehow maintain the US’s exceptional status ignoring that they want to be more like many of the other nations on earth. One can hear the cries of the Israelites and the Nephites: “Give us a king!” Patriotism is an allegiance to the highest aspirational values of your country and allowing other countries the same. Nationalism involves the hatred/envy/contempt of other countries. Nationalism loves symbols. It venerates icons and worship idols while ignoring any meaning behind them. Nationalism says the country is great because we are great. Patriotism is to reach for the good. Nationalism says you are inherently good and all problems are due to the foreign “other” that has poisoned us and/or due to other countries that hold us back or trick us or suppress our rightful place or whatever. For patriots foreign policy is about countries growing better together while dealing with countries that want to halt that progress as best they can. For nationalists foreign policy is a zero-sum game of “might makes right”. Nationalism leads to war, poverty, and authoritarianism. Patriotism can lead to a better place. A lot of nationalists either in ignorance or malice calls themselves patriots. Patriotism doesn’t run on hatred or fear. Nationalism does.

I would point out that Jesus didn’t fulfill the requirements to be the Jewish messiah. The whole idea of what the messiah meant had to be reworked to make Jesus into the messiah and a Second Coming had to be accepted so that Jesus could complete all the messianic prophecies because he did not in his mortal life. Some of the requirements to be the messiah were debated but some were universally believed. Jesus did not fulfill them in life. This is not the only time this happened. When Sabbatai Zevi was thought by many to be the Messiah in the 17th century he failed to accomplish all the messianic goals. He was coerced to convert to Islam and some of his followers insisted this was a false conversion that was part of God’s plan. Then he died and there were some Jews who held that he hadn’t really died or that he would be resurrected and come and fulfill the messianic promises. There may be some of them still around since they lived as normal Jews while holding this belief that the messiah had come and would come again. Also possible the holocaust ended up killing the last of them. Messiah ben Yosef was something of a secret of the rabbis. They didn’t want Christians to use him as a debate point. Messiah ben Yosef was supposed to fulfill the “suffering servant” part of messianic prophecy. Then his enemies would kill him and then he would be brought back to life and rule with Messiah ben David and the other two messiahs. The problem is that Messiah ben Yosef sounds a lot like Jesus and Jewish scholars really didn’t want Christians pointing this out to them. I don’t think Joseph Smith is a good fit. You have to rework the whole concept quite a bit for Joseph Smith to work in the role.

Unlikely, I doubt there will be a land invasion of Iran seeking a regime change. I am betting it stays an air power and missiles only conflict. Expensive but it doesn’t require a lot of manpower. Also the United States may not stay involved. The current administration is waffling over what happens next. My guess is the President declares victory and walks away while talking about negotiating for a peace that Israel likely won’t want yet and Iran may try to wait the conflict out.

I am talking about this specific campaign which they do not want. Yes, Iran funds militants. Also ChatGPT’s list is out of date. What dos all-out mean? And no, their target is not the United States. They do want to counter Israel’s regional influence and destabilize Israel to the extent they can. Iran was relatively muted during the Gaza campaign. They made some symbolic attempts at rhetoric but they didn’t want to be dragged into a military conflict. Israel has bombed them before. Iran knows they are weak if Israel comes out swinging. Hence why they did not want this specific engagement. They don’t want it because the risk of losing it is very high. They are self-interested, not stupid. Yes, Iran would gladly destroy Israel if they could. They can’t and they don’t want this specific conflict. Again why would North Korea do this? Also fissile material is traceable. If the bomb is used North Korea will almost certainly be exposed as the nation that gave it. And again why would North Korea care about Iran’s regional squabbles with Israel and take that risk? The 9/11 attack was performed by Al Qaeda. While Iran and Al Qaeda have grown a bit closer over the years they are not natural allies and have a lot of ideological differences. Seeing all muslim groups as a monolith is a gross oversimplification. Finding a handful of willing martyrs in a terrorist group is doable but does not mean most of the population or most of the leadership of Iran are eager to die as martyrs. That is not how people work. No, they aren’t and they won’t. If they wanted to immolate their own nation they could. If they wanted to die as martyrs all they had to do was grab every foreigner in the country one day and execute them all for religious reasons. You don’t need a nuke to get other nations to rip you to shreds. They don’t want to get ripped to shreds. You are denying people their humanity and turning them into caricatures of evil. This blinds you to reality. It also allows the people who dehumanize them to justify atrocities to stop them from doing things they weren’t actually going to do. China has even less reason to give a bomb to Iran than North Korea and potentially much much more to lose. Supplying a nuke to a rogue state would result in sanctions that would cripple the Chinese economy. It would be an incredibly stupid move especially as China has in the last six months recently started to escape the economic control that US hegemony imposed on them. There won’t be a surprise attack on Taiwan. The kind of mobilization of ships and troops needed to attack Taiwan will be seen months in advance by the US and intelligence agencies around the world. Even then it could potentially be defeated even if the United States doesn’t directly intervene. It is difficult to predict what will happen. It will be a peer competitor naval action in a confined and heavily fortified area to land troops. There will be missile launchers all over the area and drones delivering all kinds of payloads. And electronic warfare clashing in ways we haven’t seen and we have only a limited idea of how it would work. There hasn’t been a naval conflict like this before or an amphibious invasion like this before using current military tech. If Taiwan has prepared the way I think it has China may not even get ashore. Even if they do the available landing areas are horrible terrain for an invader. It would be a bloodbath for the Chinese. We also don’t know much about the state of the Chinese military. The last time they faced a peer nation in a military conflict was the Korean War. How well maintained is their military? Is it as rife with corruption as we found out Russia’s military is? Taiwan will be much more difficult than taking Ukraine would have been if Russia hadn’t gutted its own military. If China’s military has been allowed to waste away I don’t think they can pull it off. The more likely tact China would take with Taiwan would be to blockade it and/or assault its other island possessions to pressure And China is not going to attack Japan or South Korea. Wars don’t inevitably crash stock markets. You are catastrophizing and treating adversary nations like caricatures. You imagine that everyone in Iran is some kind of end-times fanatic and that for some reason non-muslims will be eager to help this along. So eager they will risk their own interests to do so. None of this is how geopolitics works.

The United States targeted and damaged three of Iran’s nuclear facilities. The President said they were obliterated but he is prone to hyperbole/lying any time he describes what he sees as his own accomplishments. Others have said they sustained damage but it is still being assessed.. It is not clear how much this will put back Iran’s nuclear program or if this is a one-time intervention or the start of a campaign.

Not going to happen. North Korea is not giving a nuke to Iran. The retaliation that would provoke could bring down North Korea. Also why would North Korea want Iran to have a nuke? Kim Jong-un is not a madman. Acquiring a nuclear deterrent was logical for him. He and other despots were taking notes when the United States toppled the governments in Afghanistan and Iraq. If they had had nukes it wouldn’t have happened. Gifting nukes to Iran would just be stupid. It also wouldn’t accomplish much. Even if they did gift the nuke and a delivery system and it got to Iran what happens? Do they shoot it at Israel? How does that benefit North Korea? It wouldn’t even benefit Iran as Iran then gets hit with Israel’s nukes. Reminder: Israel is a nuclear power. The problem with this kind of theorycrafting is it doesn’t consider motive. You just lump all the ‘bad guys’ as willing to help each other do evil and don’t consider motives and incentives or the fact that their goals aren’t in any kind of harmony. North Korea is not eager to kick off some kind of Jihadist end-times scenario. And no, not all jihadists believe that nor is Iran’s government focused primarily on ushering in the end of days by any means necessary. Iran didn’t want this conflict. This isn’t 3d chess where Iran is pushing all the pieces on the board to trigger a prophecy Also after the Mahdi comes Jesus comes next so why would you want to slow that down? 😜

Here is my amateur read of the geopolitical situation. First we deal with objectives. Israel’s stated goal is to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program. I am cynical that this is the primary reason. Israel in general and Netanyahu in particular love to beat the drum that Iran having nuclear weapons is imminent. Over a decade ago Netanyahu was saying that Iran was months away from a nuclear bomb and that has been said again and again ever since. The reality is that Netanyahu has a lot of domestic troubles. He is very unpopular at the moment and his coalition is starting to fracture. A court decision last year stripped the Haredi (Ultra-orthodox) of their protection from the draft. On the ground though the Haredi are still almost unanimously ignoring call up orders. Netanyahu is also facing investigations for corruption and recently very narrowly avoided a call to dissolve parliament. Gaza is not serving as a sufficient distraction so this is likely motivated at least in part by a desire to distract from his troubles and hopefully get a win that will keep him in power. Iran’s goal is to survive and get a nuclear deterrent. Also to keep their unpopular regime in power. They really didn’t want or need this conflict. Currently Israel claims to have total air superiority and that seems to be true. Israel also boasts impressive missile defenses. Israel managed to kill a lot of Iran’s top defense officials and has hit a lot of Iran’s infrastructure. Iran can retaliate with their own long-range missiles but most are shot down. Contrary to what some think Iran’s missiles are not inaccurate by modern standards but many miss or hit other targets due to Electronic warfare and other methods of diversion or an incomplete interception. Everything is not necessarily going Israel’s way though. Israel’s interceptors are expensive and can only be built so fast. If supplies run low Israel could be in trouble and would be forced to ration them or limit their use to defending key areas. Israel has a very fragile infrastructure. If Iran can take out Israel’s desalination plants or cut off power to them Israel could be in big trouble very quickly. Disabling the port at Haifa would also cut off vital supplies to Israel. Part of Israel’s strategy is to take out the missile launchers. Israel has claimed they have got about half of them. I am dubious. We also don’t know how big Iran’s stockpile of missiles is. Do they have enough to run Israel out of interceptors? We don’t really know. Can Israel disrupt Iran’s nuclear program? Probably not. Most of the facilities are deep underground and Israel can’t get to them. Building a nuclear bomb is trivial at this point. The key is to create enough fissile material to have a bomb. After that you also have the problem of delivering the payload to the target. This is where North Korea is at. They have nuclear bombs but no reliable way to deliver them to a target in the face of US and South Korean missile defenses. This is part of the impetus behind North Korea’s new blue water destroyers. Some may have seen the failed launch of the second destroyer which didn’t go so well. Having longer ranged naval vessels that could deliver a nuclear weapon to a target complicates defending against an attack. What Israel wants is for the US to use their bunker buster bombs to take out the underground facilities. These weapons have not been given to Israel. There is internal infighting in the US administration about whether this is a good idea. It is also worth noting that these bombs may not succeed even if used. Once you get to a certain depth it is very difficult to do anything even with advanced weapons. You could theoretically knock them out with ground troops but no one wants to go down that route. It is worth noting that Israel and Iran don’t share a border and Iran doesn’t have a semi-reliable ally anymore they could move troops through. I also doubt Iran has the logistical ability to fight such a ground war even if Syria would let them through. It is also worth noting that in the past Iran would probably have relied on coordinating attacks with Hezbollah to overwhelm Israel’s defenses but Hezbollah doesn’t have the capability to help as much as it used to. So Israel can hit Iran with relative impunity but history shows that you can’t force capitulation through strategic bombing. Since the end of World War 1 theorists argued you could but reality has shown it doesn’t work. There is a wildcard element in that rebellious elements in Iran might topple the government but I wouldn’t count on it and I think the likelihood of this happening is pretty low. Will this usher in the end of days? Not likely. If Iran gets a bomb (or already has one) and uses it to target an Israeli city then Iran gets nuked by Israel. I don’t see this happening but that is the worst case situation I see. Also, one side piece. Iran is claiming it has down several F-35 fighters. If true, this would be big. Iran’s air defenses and their own planes shouldn’t be able to touch a fifth generation fighter. I suspect Iran is lying. All of the images I have seen were faked. Some have compared this conflict to the one in Ukraine but they are different. If either side in that conflict could establish local air superiority the way Israel has they would probably start winning. Neither side can. This is not a ground war so it matters a little less in this case. So where is this going? I see the two sides trading strikes until Israel either declares victory or one or both sides can’t continue. I personally hope the United States stays uninvolved. If you want some morbid humor you can watch the Tucker Carlson vs Ted Cruz interview where they play weaselly word games and cheap rhetorical tricks on each other when arguing about whether the United States should get involved. It is humiliating on so many levels. I am being clinical and high-level. People are losing their lives for this and the horrors of conflict are all over the region including in Gaza where the conflict hasn’t stopped.

The plural marriage part of it is all of Section 132. Making the first part about marriage sealings in general is a recent revision that really doesn’t make sense in context. Also the Saints didn’t follow Section 132. They were marrying lots of non-virgins.

Revelation isn’t ratified. It is accepted or rejected. Rejecting a revelation from the prophet is not a good thing. The body of the Church is not a collection of sages convened to determine if it is actually revelation through careful study and prayer. They don’t know. They can reject it which is basically saying we won’t live by this revelation.

Pretty good rundown. I like how he acknowledges the argument that the “new and everlasting covenant” can be spun to be about monogamous sealings or serial sealings with only one wife alive at a time but is clear that that is not how it would be taken by John Taylor or other people at the time and the clues are that it doesn’t mean that. The argument that ancient prophets/sages/mystics/whatever spoke in coded truths whose meaning has been lost goes back to at least Stoicism and heavily influenced how Christians dealt with the Old Testament. It is weird seeing arguments in real time that God was communicating to John Taylor but that John Taylor misunderstood it or hid the truth for some reason. It is silly. It also suggests that God is really really bad at communicating…..which actually would explain a lot.

“Is it possible” is the way you start leading questions that want you to believe that aliens built the pyramids. Who caught and revealed the problem? A government agency. Who falsified the data that led to approval? Private contractors. Blaming this on the government is patently ridiculous. This story is pretty much a perfect case study on why more regulation and government fact-checking is needed yet someone is spinning it as a government problem? This is the best they got?

Possible, but I would expect a more targeted message if this was deliberate. This looks like bots just doing their thing.

A little hard to do. The 1886 revelation implies that plural marriage is mandatory for exaltation. I take a bit of issue with the 1886 revelation: “Have I not given my word in great plainness on this subject?” No, not really God. Even in this revelation you are talking around the subject and speaking in what seem to be euphemisms for plural marriage. In Section 132 you talk around the subject forever before getting to the point so that people think the whole thing isn’t about plural marriage despite you explicitly saying it is at the start. Need to work on that plainness thing really.

Also just capping all users on how many threads a day they can start would make this more difficult for the bots. Does anyone start more than one or two threads a day here?

I have mostly soured on the whole mandatory reporting thing. We are focusing too much on detection and surveillance when effort would be better spent hitting at many of the root causes. Also mandatory reporting with penalties for not reporting lead to a surplus of reports. Mandatory reporters have to report to avoid penalties even if that report is dubious so resources are wasted. The sad truth is that reporting a problem does not mean it gets fixed. In some cases it gets worse. We are doing it wrong.

I don’t believe anything anyone in the Engelhart family says. They ran their vegan restaurants in an almost cult-like way and then were caught not being vegan. Now their restaurants are serving meat or something. Also regenerative farming is a mix of some agricultural practices and some witchy woo woo nonsense that they claim will do almost magical things that science doesn’t support. The whole ‘distant bureaucracies are evil’ thing is rhetorical nonsense. The farmer has a profit motive to cut costs and sell substandard food if they can get away with it. The bureaucracy that maintains food standards has the motive to make sure food is safe. And we aren’t going to be able to go back to a model where we use personal relationships with individual farmers as a form of social shaming to avoid this. She wants to go back to subsistence agriculture where farmers still did try to cheat others? Raw milk often carries dangerous diseases. Yes, the United States is okay with too much toxic crap in our food. People in the EU are shocked by our low standards. The solution isn’t to make more dangerous things legal to sell. The introduction of pasteurization saved and continues to save millions of lives. Going backwards on this is a really dumb move akin to deciding vaccines aren’t necessary. We will not learn from history so why not bring back tuberculosis, typhoid fever, measles, and polio because we are unfamiliar with how horrible they can be? Ugh………. The American family farm is dying and will be dead soon. Most of the family farms now are legal fictions owned by agri-corps trying to suck up that sweet agricultural subsidy money. Also some of the few surviving family farms are going under since DOGE just cut all kinds of agricultural supports and cancelled reimbursements for eco-friendly improvements many farmers had already paid for so more will be going under. Also the recent tariff debacle has convinced many international buyers to buy crops elsewhere so that won’t help either.

Chevron deference is gone. They’re not that good at running “their” industries themselves and if unregulated many would risk or directly inflict harm on others. He is doing everything the industries he is supposed to curtail would want. He is slashing apart all the regulatory agencies that make sure medication meets standards or that food isn’t poisonous. He doesn’t have a few nutjob opinions. He is talking about how vitamins can cure measles resulting in cases of vitamin toxicity trying to follow his pseudoscientific nonsense. He just stocked vaccine agencies with vaccine deniers. Bringing measles and polio back BABY! He isn’t some maverick defying industry. He is a lickspittle stepping back and letting them do exactly what they want. Scientists and doctors are afraid of him. Industry execs either love him or hate him based on his opinion of what they do. He isn’t respected by anyone of consequence. He is a friend to snake oil salesmen. The almost completely unregulated untested supplement industry loves him. His solution to my medical problem is to ship me off as slave labor to a rehabilitation farm. Regulators (i.e. the bureaucracies) aren’t that partisan. There is little incentive to be. I don’t believe in the ‘privately or publicly owned good, government bad’ binary. Each should be evaluated on its own merits. These kinds of lazy shortcuts may make things simpler to make sense of but they don’t lead to better outcomes.