The goal of science is to disprove our theories so we can find out if they are true, and hopefully replace them with improved versions.
The goal of religious study is to try to prove that it is not impossible, not that it is a probably reading of what happened. To find some absurd way of reconciling different stories. I have no idea how you can call that an answer.
Well these "answers", whether absurd or not, were good enough for societies to live by them and survive for millennia.
Furthermore, even though you can argue that science can give some answers, it definitely under-delivers on questions like "what is good and evil" or "why you should have kids". Some of those are covered by the "humanism" neoreligion, some of them aren't. This whole experiment is very modern, it's not clear what are long-term survival rates of societies that completely give up on religions in a classical sense. It could turn out that societies that believe in nonsense have an edge over the ones that don't, after all this matches our experience all the way up until the 20th century.
I agree science doesn’t give good answers for good and evil, for me religion gives even worse answers. For example the Bible is clearly in favor of slavery as an institution. Other religions like Buddhism are for me better.
The scary part is that there may not be a good or evil, and the answers we have are just made up stuff.
Slavery made a lot of economic sense prior to the industrial revolution. If you consider "good and evil" as a set of norms that help society to thrive (as in outcompete other societies for resources) then it's not surprising that slavery went from good to bad as the technology progressed.
That's the only remotely rational view of it that I'm aware of. "Remotely" because without some kind of religion it doesn't follow that outcompeting other societies or survival in general is "good".
So in the end yes, I do believe "good and evil" are made up. Luckily, it's not a bad thing.
I do think it’s possible that God and evil are a set of norms that help society (or actually their leaders) thrive, but are presented as universal values.
I think there is a huge distinction to what it’s good for the average person in society vs what is good for the rulers, and it is unclear which one of those you mean.
> I think there is a huge distinction to what it’s good for the average person in society vs what is good for the rulers, and it is unclear which one of those you mean.
I mean it in the most brutal sense, maximizing replication and persistence of religion bearers (you can say average person in society).
In a short term religions can benefit current rulers, but in a long term selection must be geared towards survival of societies and cultures as a whole, otherwise they wouldn't have lived into the modern age.
After WW1, in the treaty of Versailles the German Reich, having just lost the war, was made responsible for starting it - it played a part in starting it, but was hardly fully responsible. So its successor state got a huge amount of reparations forced upon. Calling that out was a part of the appeal of the Nazis to the germans.
Now, how that is related to freezing assets from Russia I do not see. Even if interpreted as some kind of reparations, the lesson of that time was not that all reparations lead to a later war. Rather that humiliation will lead to resentment which can lead to war later. Huge and unjust reparations can be a part of that, but that's hardly the scenario we see today.
Macron is (understandably) deeply unpopular in France right now, seems like that seeps into the judgement of his actions here.
Some historians agree, some disagree. It's a typical question for your high school history exams. A good one as one can arrive at both answers when looking at the historic facts. In very short: The German Reich wanted that war and pushed it, but so did the other European nations.
"Germany" as we know it today did not exist before or during or even directly after WW1. You could just as easily say e.g. Poland was responsible for WW1 because most of that region was also part of the German Empire.
What's next, making Italy pay reparations for the roman empire? Making Turkey or other arab countries pay reparations for their empires?
I'm not sure what your point is because nobody is suggesting that modern Germany pay reparation for WW1. The discussion was about reparations that Germany has already paid after WW1, imposed on it by the victorious Entente. There's a long-standing historical myth that those reparations were 1) unjustified because Germany was not actually solely or primarily responsible for the war, and 2) excessive. It further goes to claim that this is a big part of why Germany went Nazi and started WW2 eventually. This was, indeed, the prevailing wisdom in the inter-war era, but Fritz Fischer poked a lot of holes in it after WW2.
At this point, while there's still no consensus as to the degree of German responsibility, most historians would weight it significantly higher than that of the Entente. The notion that reparations (and the Treaty of Versailles in general) was particularly onerous and punitive has also been largely debunked. However, the popular understanding still mostly reflects the inter-war consensus and not the later developments.
Interesting that official site [1] doesn't even use the word "coin". Yes, it of course has all the disclaimers that it's not an investment. Also that it "is not political and has nothing to do with any political campaign". In case anyone got the wrong impression.
Race is clearly cultural in todays society because we can make it so. Very unlikely to be genetically culturally if that is what you are saying (but of course, who knows).
What I'm saying is that it the AI to me illustrates how much of a self-own drawing these cultural battle lines is.
If you choose to describe yourself by the colour of your skin first and foremost then you're telling everyone that you think that's relevant information which is, well.. the entire problem - you're telling everyone around you that you think it has predictive power.
But that's what racists are, people who think the race of a person has predictive power with regard to their nature, culture etc.
We can't expect people whose lives are, in great part, defined by the societal oppression they face, to be at the forefront of trying to erase the distinctions the bigots hold over them – not least because it'd be ineffective, serving only to hide the abuse. The categorisation schemes used by bigots (e.g. racists) do have predictive power: for the behaviour of bigots, and the resulting effects on the social context of people's lives.
People being loud and proud about their marginalised identities is not a problem. The pushback, and the pushback-to-the-pushback, and the pushback-to-the-pushback-to-the-pushback (the so-called "culture war") is a problem to the extent it gets in the way of solving the root problem (marginalisation, bigotry, and abuse), but statements of pride help address the root problem.
Rather than criticise "drawing these cultural battle lines", please fight the fight you think people should be fighting. You won't find yourself short of allies, should you make the effort. (Effort includes educating yourself about the relevant issues: it's pretty easy to find highly-specific resources. If you're completely stuck, and somehow have lost access to Wikipedia, visit your local library.)
Being proud of your identity and culture is not a problem at all!
The thing that I feel that this silly AI bot draws into sharp contrast is the idea that there can simultaneously be "asian/white/black culture" - as a generalised thing, not a person's experience in a neighbourhood or a country, literally just "white/black/asianness" (or whatever), and obviously the connotation there is that skin colour is intrinsically linked to culture, but then we expect people to pretend that skin colour has no correlation.
You can't have it both ways, it's a contradiction.
And here we have, err, a computer program, or the output of one, pulling in all of this stuff and claiming that it has a culture based on experiences of being a skin colour that it doesn't and can't even have.
That's a false dichotomy. The "intrinsically" connotation is not there (you're reading that in), but civil rights activists often discuss the relationships between culture and skin colour. Any book (or Wikipedia article) on the subject should provide this information, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_race_theory.
I do agree that the AI bots were farcical, but they don't highlight what you're saying. You're talking about nth-degree pushback-to-pushback as though it's the actual facts-on-the-ground, which it's not. (The "culture war" is composed solely of the assumption that there is culture war, and people's responses to that: unlike the real issues, like systematic oppression, it'll go away as soon as we stop talking about it.)
To be fair, how the term is normally used depends entirely on the group within which the term is being used. For many, racism is strictly “prejudice + power”, which logically concludes in the [in my opinion rather warped] idea that some groups are incapable of racism, which is at odds with the definition you’re citing
You're right, but in practice I don't really consider it as being too fundamentally different because it's the logical conclusion from strong enough predictive power.
There is nothing "logical" about the progression from my appearance and ancestry is something I'm entitled to be proud of; also there might actually be such a thing as Black American culture to racial epithets and Jim Crow laws. Or indeed using "predictive power" to assess people's intellectual ability or criminal propensity from their melanin content.
I mean, do you believe that people should expect to be subjected to the weirdest and most hostile takes on gender relations and treated as potential rapists or sluts unless and until everyone uses gender neutral pronouns (even silly bots mostly identify as male and female at the moment)? If not, what is it about racism that obliges victims not to affirm their identity if they wish to cease to become victims?
I work for a FAANG and a month, well planned, vacation is totally OK. If I want to take a week of I more or less need no notice, but for a month it would be expected I plan ahead what the people I work with should do.
I have 5 weeks vacation and unlimited sick days every year.
My experience of working for a couple of FAANGs does not mirror this - while I was never laid off during a vacation, I think every vacation over 3 weeks I ever took, I returned to discover that my team had either suffered a major reorg, or the entire project was cancelled, and I had to find another team to work on.
Yep, I've taken several three-week vacations and it's never been a problem. The main thing is just giving plenty of advance notice (and reminding people as it gets close) so my manager can schedule around it, and making sure projects are in a good state with arrangements made for anything that needs covering while I'm out.
The goal of religious study is to try to prove that it is not impossible, not that it is a probably reading of what happened. To find some absurd way of reconciling different stories. I have no idea how you can call that an answer.