Hear, hear! Bigger problems nowadays, but more control over my life to compensate.

There's also something that's really calming about having more life experience? Like back in 2013 I was mortified at the prospect of getting bad grades. Missing assignments was the #1 source of stress in my life, and it was all-consuming at the time.

Now? I know not only did that not matter, but that any given thing that stresses me out that badly has a good chance of ultimately not mattering in the same way.

They are mortal. They do what they do because they do not fear consequences.

This has been two statements of fact, with no implied conclusions or sub-text.

Physical therapists! I swear by physical therapy. I had sciatica for about a year, and after a few weeks of physical therapy, it was 100% gone.

The doctor I went to before that said basically "lose weight and come back in 6 months". My first PT session, the therapist did some deep tissue thing to my lower back and (temporarily) made the pain go away almost completely. She was like "Yeah you have an injured muscle that tenses up weird now, do these exercises at home and it should clear up" and ended up being 100% right.

It's Lemmy. We've got to have at least one "America Bad" comment per thread, no matter how irrelevant.

Idiotic take. Let Trump back in the white house and see how "theoretical" it stays.

I'm here for it. The purpose of protesting is not to wave signs around in a way that is convinient and easy to ignore. Protests are supposed to disrupt things, to get the attention of people in power. There's supposed to be an implied threat: "Look at all these upset people who are willing to break the law. Be a real shame if they went from blocking traffic to dragging oil executives out of buildings!" A polite and legal protest may be great for movement building, but it's ultimately the same as asking nicely in terms of power and demands. His only mistake, the way I see it, was not bringing more people with him.

Okay look. I am an atheist, I think magical thinking in general and Christianity in particular are harmful and unnecessary.

BUT

I also enjoy learning about new testament history as a hobby. I've actually read the book How Jesus Became God that the article mentions, and they do a sneaky thing that annoys the shit out of me: they quote things being said by someone who disagrees with them that appear to completely demolish their own position, without quoting the explanation and nuance that inevitably follows. Ehrman obviously doesn't see the quoted text as a problem for the idea of a historical Jesus, and usually explains as much after saying something like that.

I won't nit-pick all the little over-simplifications, but I want to make an example out of one of them:

The gospel of Mark is thought to be the earliest existing "life of Jesus," and linguistic analysis suggests that Luke and Matthew both simply reworked Mark and added their own corrections and new material. But they contradict each other and, to an even greater degree contradict the much later gospel of John, because they were written with different objectives for different audiences. The incompatible Easter stories offer one example of how much the stories disagree.

The incompatible Easter stories are actually something many secular scholars point to as evidence in favor of a historical Jesus.

I'll go into more detail if anyone cares, but the broad strokes are this: the nativity narratives in both Matthew and Luke contradict not only each other but also known history and even basic plausibility. We're pretty confident they were both made up.

So, why? Why would two different authors working from the same source material both tell weird lies about Jesus' birth?

Well, the expectation of the Jewish public at the time was that the messiah would be born in Bethlehem. Mark doesn't talk about Jesus' birth, but it does say he was from Nazareth of Galilee. That presents a problem: how is this guy who people are calling Jesus of Nazareth also the messiah from Bethlehem?

That's where we get Matthew and Luke trying to smooth things over: Matthew makes up a story about how Jesus was totally born in Bethlehem, trust me bro but Herod the Great tried to kill him so Joseph and Mary hid in Egypt until he died but then his son took over Judea so they moved to Nazareth. True story bro.

Then in Luke, the author says that Joseph and Mary lived in Nazareth, but Caesar ordered a census of the whole Roman empire where everyone had to return to their ancestral homeland because reasons. So they go to Bethlehem because David was Joseph's... great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather? Why they stopped at exactly twenty generations (and how the fuck Joseph would have known that before ancestry.com) is never specified.

Even if we grant miraculous intervention, these stories are both ridiculous on their face (at least, to a modern audience). If Jesus was fabricated whole cloth, why include these bullshit Easter narratives in the first place? Why not just say "He was born in Bethlehem" and be done with it? To my mind, these stories make the most sense as a post-hoc ass-covering to explain how the guy who was walking around calling himself "Jesus from Nazareth" was actually totally from Bethlehem the whole time.

There are plenty of gun laws out there that a reasonable person could see merit in challenging: rules about short-barrel rifles / braces & pot smokers not being able to own guns probably aren't saving any lives.

The fact that this is the one they go after is just such a demonstration of malintent. There's good evidence for a relationship between domestic violence and mass shooters.

This should be a bi-partisan slam-dunk. Minimally invasive to law-abiding gun owners, gets guns out of the hands of dangerous criminals. What public good is served in challenging it?

Sounds like a good reason radically restructure (if not entirely dismantle) those companies.

We should make medicine to treat sick people. We should build houses to shelter the unhoused. We should grow food to feed the hungry.

The fact that most companies currently responsible for food and housing and medicine are primarily motivated by shareholder value instead of effective community service represents a structural conflict of interest.

“One of the problems of the two party system is what Margaret Thatcher used to call ‘Tina’ – there is no alternative,” he said, referring to a phrase the former British prime minister used to defend her government’s stringent economic policies in the early 1980s.

“The Democratic party has this crypto-fascist element when it comes to mass incarceration, when it comes to dropping bombs … when it comes to surveillance, when it comes to violation of individual liberties vis-a-vis the national security state.”

I mean, he has a point. However, I don't know that acknowledging the flaws in a two-party system, then running in such a way that'll likely invoke those very same flaws is a winning strategy.

It seems to me like someone in his shoes would be more effective running for congress / rallying people around reworking our current first-past-the-post voting system & electoral college.

Sounds like something a nice bedroom would offset.

Author's website + followup comics:

https://www.nickmaskell.com/comics/

Looks like this is episode 1 of 4 so far.