I don’t even know what Mastodon looks like and I don’t know who the guy is, but I’m just assuming he’s lying because it sounds like the usual “crazy pronoun libs” dog whistle.

The Egyptians have Ramses

Uh? Ramesses was human - all 11 of them were. Egypt has the likes of Ra, Osiris, Anubis and so on, who I don’t think are particularly tyranical in their stories.

For China, the actual mythology stuff is a lot of creation myth, but they do have a few stories about a divine emperor crushing an army of demons, and it turns out a lot of that is actually about conquering less developed, more nomadic cultures to unify China (Japan pretty much did the same, creation myth then crushing foreign demons that are actually literally foreigners not under their rule). And then there’s the whole mandate of Heaven that they used to justify dynasties rising and falling, mixing up history into myth, that began when a government that started well ended up being seen as tyranical after a few centuries (the Shang, ending with Zhou and Daji).

Older, more primordial mythologies just start at world creation myth, and then talk about humans figuring out how to settle the land, and how the universe works. Mesopotamian cultures mostly focus on defeating the forces of nature, which does involve standing up to violent gods or monsters, but that comes from trying to build up a civilization that can survive disasters, and is actually not tied to tyranical human rulers. Any civilization needs to start with things like water control, that’s why everyone from China to Greece also have that. Sumerians specifically have cities that go to war with each other because “the chief god of their city told them to”, which is obviously manipulation to secure resources, but isn’t particularly tyranical against their own people. And then the Bronze Age Collapse happens, after which the myth of Ishbi and Erra shows a war god who gets petty and kills everyone because people didn’t pay attention to him. So again, the stories of tyranical gods come from people trying to survive and explain destruction events, from nature or from outside forces. When the Assyrians go around killing everyone, Sennacherib destroys Babylon out of anger and frustration - he tries to write a story about the god of Babylon ordering him to do that, and another story of his own god putting the same god of Babylon on trial for some crime, but that doesn’t stick and Sennacherib gets murdered.

At some point it’s not easy to distinguish mythology and simply literature. For China specifically, Journey to the West and Investiture of the Gods talk a lot about the bureaucracy and hierarchy of the Heavens, the oppression of gods and demons - but they’re 16th century novels, are they really mythology? Those stories clearly became popular because people felt oppressed by tyrants, so the myths about tyranical gods can of course be a reaction to the people experiencing tyranical rule. Sun Wukong’s story famously starts because the various systems of the Heavens can’t contain him (and mankind), only Buddha can - but then that’s still a 16 c. novel that showed up long after the creation of Buddhist “mythology”, its spiritual structure and divine figures.

So there’s multiple reasons for stories to pop up about gods becoming tyrants, either because the people get upset at actual tyrant kings, or because one country tries to justify the destruction of another country. But there’s a distinction to be made about stories written as piece of literature and when they become actual civilization building myths that is a fundamental part of its culture. The older a civilization develops and gets centralized, the more opportunities you get for anyone to write more stories that become myth a few hundred years later. If that civilization has ups and downs, the stories about gods are more likely to reflect that. (I think Egypt got out of that because it actually collapsed 3 times, and kept starting over with new gods doing the same things, none of the unified kingdoms lasted more that 500 years)

That’s the point, the myth is always about “unskilled labour” and that’s specifically what pro-capitalist people believe - that low skill is the same as unskilled and low wages workers are “unskilled” and that’s why they deserve to stay where they are because they are brainless. And I am obviously above that, so you better not raise the lowest wages to the same as my level, it would be an insult to my skills that I totally have and they don’t. That is specifically the message and the brainwashing.

Hebrew used a generic word for fruit, all languages translated that word as their version of apple which was generic at the time, and then much later, all languages changed the meaning of their word for apple, it’s not specific to French. The use of apple for one specific fruit is fairly recent - more recent than the King James Bible, even.

I don’t know what the word in Hebrew is and if it also changed its meaning since then, though.

No one blames New York on the Avengers, or even on Thor. It only gets serious with Sokovia, which is entirely Tony’s fault going off the rails in secret. It’s also introduced slowly and early, with a woman blaming Tony for her son’s death in Avengers I think (before the Iron Man thing), which starts him early on facing his guilt and responsibility, leading to his fuck-up.

Does the article say the headline is wrong? Or does it say conspiracy theorists listen to facts because it relies on a handful of willing participants who changed their mind when seeing facts and reports? Because that’s not the crux of the crazy conspiracy theorists.

Try again when the chatbot talked to the likes of Graham Hancock or the hardcore MAGA death cult. Facts don’t matter.

Rand pointed out that many conspiracy theorists actually want to talk about their beliefs. “The problem is that other people don’t want to talk to them about it,”

Just look at this guy who straight up pretends that no one tried to talk to them before.

It does talk about gish gallop at the very end, and claims that the chatbot can keep presenting arguments - but doesn’t actually say that it has worked.

A bomb that could destroy Earth’s core would be an admittedly impressive technical feat!

The “gospels were dictated by first hand witness” idea is a massive problem because that’s not first hand account at all, that’s actually someone claiming that someone else told him “dude I swear I saw it happen in front of me as clear as I see you” (or worse, the guy who wrote it claims that he found this text written by someone else 50 years ago) and we somehow chose to believe both the guy who wrote it and the supposed guy who told him that. Having something dictated is second hand account, not first hand, because that’s just changing the pronoun of the person speaking. And there were extensive analysis of the text itself to try to figure out what kind of person would have phrased this or that in certain ways, whether it says “I saw that myself” or “my uncle who works at Nintendo told me he saw it himself”, and that analysis, done for the entirety of the Bible, has gone pretty far, including the gospels. As far as I know about it, the biggest point about that analysis is which gospel was written first and which ones copied from which ones or added their own thing, rahter than 4 different people recounting their memories of the same events.

I don’t know about the timeline of the temple; I’ve heard it brought up before, but I haven’t heard that it was considered conclusive evidence for dating the text, so I don’t know more than that and how it holds to the text analysis.

None of those are first hand. The gospels were written by other people more than a generation (60 years) after, not by people who were alive in that period of 30 years.

Notice how it says people agree but doesn’t say there is any evidence.

The best we have is letters from a whole generation after his death, and it’s only people saying “these guys say there was a dude a while back” , second hand comments, no living first hand account.