@unmarkedcards / unmarkedcards.tumblr.com
me: care about people
half the notes: youre the real oppressor for telling me what to do.
the other half: cut out this useless liberal proselatizing. you are an invertebrate and you will perish in the revolution.
we have a new prize comment which is “pretty neurotypical of you to assume i have the capacity to care about other people”
I keep thinking about...ethics vs the Good (or valuable). I think since plato theres been the idea (not universal, but I think relatively common, and without an explicitly stared antithesis) that behaving ethically is in some sense "the same" as pursuing the good. And obviously that's ALLOWED as a position, but I don't think it's required....or, it becomes a bit of a definitional question. It's far from obvious what exactly we mean by "ethical". There's a sociological pose you can take, where we can talk about a certain class of behavioral pressures that societies tend to develop. And we can talk about the moral instinct. But like...feeding the hungry, and making a painting or whatever, these are both I think obviously "valuable" acts. But the former feels more relevantly "ethical". But if ethics ISN'T pursuing the good and valuable, what IS it about? Like "ethics is pursuing the good" isn't a great answer but any other answer is confusing
An answer I like: ethics is a set of constraints you must operate under while pursuing the Good. I think this is a rather classic answer, something like the notion of a "moral code".
well i mean, sure, but then...why? what is special or significant about this set of constraints if theyre not about pursuing what is good, valuable? like, "ethics is pursuing the good" is not a great answer, it feels like it's not fully capturing what's going on there, but its *an* explanation, a grounding of what we mean when we talk about ethics.
I mean, at this level of abstraction they both feel just as arbitrary. Like you could ask "why is the good worth pursuing", and an answer might be "because the Good is precisely that which is worth doing". So you ask "why must you accord with ethics" and the answer is "because ethics is that which you must accord with". They can be two distinct notions, in this sense.
Perhaps ethics is "how to avoid the bad". As in, there are plenty of ways that one can "do evil that good may come of it," as the saying goes.
An unthinkable new chapter in The Upright Soldier, my Wheel of Time/Exalted fusion, is out this morning: L'enfer.
Listening to the Hills of Tanchico after already knowing what it's about is so funny "three's too many??"
THE HIIIIIILLS OOOOOF TANCHICOOOOOO
hey so did I misunderstand something or did aviendha channel swords (cool af) this episode against the forsaken (& against the aiel code) ?
Nah they’re spears they’re just hard to see, look for the haft on the other side of her hands. I think they might have used a *little* too much fire but it was cool as hell
The reason the haft is so hard to see is that it's a translucent blue. It's most visible when it passes in front of doors and windows. I assume it's made from Air and/or Water rather than Fire.
Galad: “yOu nKoW nOtHiNg oF tHe wOrLd”…
[Elayne, after escaping from the White Tower for the second time, right in the middle of a street fight in one of the wildest cities in the Western Kingdoms, perfectly imitating Tanchican slang and about to sing a song about tits in true Robert Jordan style]
Josha Stradowski as Rand al'Thor in The Wheel of Time 3.05
look! the moonlight shows us for what we really are. we are not among the living, and so we cannot die — but neither are we dead.
04/03/2025
by
As the stock market crashes and the global economy reels from President Donald Trump's illogical and reckless tariffs, Trump's supporters are doing their best to put a positive spin on the crisis he has created.
For example, Christian nationalist pseudo-historian Tim Barton claims that support for Trump's tariff policy can be found in the Bible.
To make his case, Barton cited the story in Matthew 17 where Jesus and Peter were discussing paying the “temple tax.” In this passage, Jesus argued that just as the “kings of the earth” do not levy taxes on their own children, neither should he, as the son of God, be required to pay the tax in order to enter the temple.
This guy's tortured interpretations of the Bible are VERY DANGEROUS. He's one of the people claiming that because there (according to him) is nothing in the Bible about the Iron Age kingdoms creating social safety nets that it is wrong for America to have one. House Speaker Mike Johnson believes this nonsense.
So here's Barton's reasoning in the article:
"One of the things in the Bible that when it gets into taxes and Jesus was questioned about paying the temple tax," Barton said. "[Jesus] says, 'Do the kings tax the sons or the foreigners?' And Peter says, 'Well, of course it's the foreigners,' and Jesus said, 'Well, I agree, but since we don't want to offend them, go and catch a fish [with a] coin in the mouth and we're gonna pay the taxes.'" "It's interesting because a tariff is a tax on foreign goods," he continued. "When Jesus is asking like this semi-rhetorical question—what to them is an obvious answer, like, the king doesn't tax their own sons, they don't tax their own people, they tax the foreigners—we oftentimes read the Bible and don't connect what the reality is of where that application is. What is he really saying? He's making a connection that it's obvious that we should be taxing the people that are bringing goods in, not just taxing the people that are making goods here."
Well, the problem is that Jesus wasn't saying that the king taxes foreigners. Here's the key passage from Matthew 17:25:
“What do you think, Simon?” he asked. “From whom do the kings of the earth collect duty and taxes—from their own children or from others?”
The reality is that in this passage (which we have no idea if Jesus really said since Matthew was written about 80 to 90 years after Jesus died) Jesus was referring to the literal children of the king, NOT the citizens of the king. The citizens of the king were the "others" to whom he was referring--NOT "foreigners."
We also know that despite Trump's dishonest claims about tariffs being paid by other countries that in the end tariffs are NOT taxes on foreigners. They are paid by the Americans who import the goods, who in turn charge their American buyers more for the goods. So ultimately, tariffs are a tax on the American consumer.
The author of this article, Kyle Mantyla, points out all of the above and also comments that Jesus's main point had nothing to do with economics:
Jesus was not teaching a parable about economics, but was rather signaling he was exempt from the temple tax, which was established in Exodus and reaffirmed in Nehemiah, because of his unique position as the son of God.
Mantyla concludes:
Barton's argument is utter nonsense and is a prime example of the way in which Christian nationalists routinely misrepresent passages from the Bible and rip them out of context in order to promote their right-wing political agenda. In this regard he continues to follow in the footsteps of his father David, who has claimed that Jesus’ parables and other scriptural passages mean that God is opposed to minimum wage laws, capital gains taxes, and “socialist union kind of stuff.”
I don't know if Barton is just stupid or dishonest. My guess is the latter.
Lying is a big sin in the Bible--it's even one of the top 10 sins prohibited in the Ten Commandments. Given this, it amazes me how far-right "Christians" like Barton and Mike Johnson lie all the time (by telling half-truths, outright lies, or lies of omission). How they rationalize that with Christian values is a true mystery.
Barton's interpretation has been standard-issue (though not universal) among evangelicals for a very long time, and it is indeed more a matter of "stupidity", or more accurately, ignorance, than of dishonesty.
Evangelical beliefs emerge out of the Radical Reformation complex of early Protestantism, which objected to both the monarchy and the papacy. Their intended goal was once more akin to modern anarcho-socialism. Following the rise of democracy and the beginnings of industrialization, however, they found themselves forced to choose between opposition to powerful and potentially brutal government (including at that time the military and police) and opposition to private wealth. They chose the former and became the earliest variety of paleo-libertarians. They gave up pacifism to help fight the Axis powers.
At the end of the day, however, their primary political goal is always going to be whatever weakens the government, and to that end they take up whatever reading of a passage seems to support that goal. Call it a barely-conscious form of willful ignorance; they genuinely expect that God holds all earthly organizational authority in contempt and assume that the Bible will support them. Intellectual authorities who disagree are presumed to be bootlickers. There remains some level on which they still object to the carceral state and the military, but that is relegated to the *last* part of the government to go; first people must learn to behave themselves without supervision, and they show no sign of doing so.
Lanfear, Rahvin, Sammael: Actively trying to find and either manipulate or kill Rand
Moghedien for some reason:
