ThePopularAutist

Anti-Mormonism in a nutshell: Your belief is not in the Bible! 😡 …5 minutes later ⏰ Joseph Smith just copied the Bible! 😡

@Sola_GPT There is a long standing tradition of changing the nature of the Godhead and its members lol. Creedalists, am I right? 🥲

AI estimates it wasn’t until early 90s that a majority of evangelicals started saying Latter-day Saints have a “different Jesus” We’ve always had the same Jesus of the Bible but maybe theirs changed?

@Latterdaytruth Both but for different reasons.

Online or paper scriptures for studying?

When you import people, they are not coming with a blank slate. You are also importing their norms, traditions, customs, world views, memory, taboos, conflicts, group identity, Language with its encoded interpretive loading, etc. This has costs way beyond economics that do not get properly accounted for.

Immigration is not a solution to the fertility crisis. If anything it makes it worse because we drag down their birthrates too once they get here. Immigrant fertility dropped below replacement in 2019.

@surskitmaxxing @Sola_GPT @JCRyle Surely the Lord God will do nothing, but he revealeth his secret unto his servants the prophets. Amos 3:7

@Sola_GPT @JCRyle You'd have to prove from the Bible that the true church is required to have prophets And even just having a figure who calls himself the prophet seems insufficient if he doesn't actually receive prophesies or meaningfully communicate with God

It's not rape if there was no legal category for rape in their culture. 🤪 Crude joke aside there is something to be understood here. When we project our culture, norms, traditions, customs, duties, rights, obligations, laws, etcetera onto other peoples we assume they were/are capable of something they had/have not discovered. This is one of many major problems with the grand idea that we are all created equal, we clearly are not, which is why we create norms, traditions, customs, discover law, etc. these are all means by which we try to create symmetry for cooperation amongst a distribution of unequal people.

Just a reminder that exmos like @Kate_Kelly_Esq do not care about the truth. They never did.

The legal fix is to stop treating this as a vague cultural problem and treat it as externalized harm: if a platform profits by imposing attentional, reputational, relational, or institutional costs on others, it should bear liability for those costs. In law: define those as protected interests, classify manipulative algorithmic cost-shifting as a tort, require insurance/auditability/restitution, and force platforms to internalize the damage they now offload onto families, communities, and the public. They keep the profit. Everyone else pays the wear. That’s not just bad culture. It’s uncompensated trespass.

What you’re describing is not just “social confusion.” It is a form of unaccounted-for property damage. Why? Because the thing being damaged is a real demonstrated interest: the social order people build over time with effort, trust, role separation, reputation, family boundaries, and context-specific norms. That is a kind of capital. It took time, restraint, reciprocity, and memory to build. Social media flattened those layered relationships into one undifferentiated audience and one undifferentiated status field: “friends,” “followers,” “engagement,” “content.” In doing so, it destroyed contextual boundaries that previously protected the value of those relationships. It mixed grandmother, coworker, political adversary, drinking buddy, stranger, and algorithm into the same behavioral space. That is damage. It is property damage in the sense that a platform imposed costs on interests people had already built and depended on: reputational capital, relational capital, household authority, local norms, attention, trust, and the ability to present different lawful selves in different legitimate contexts. The platform captured the upside of that destruction as profit, while pushing the costs outward onto users, families, communities, and institutions. So the loss showed up socially and psychologically, but not on anyone’s balance sheet. That is an externalized cost. In plain language: unpriced trespass. The algorithmic layer makes it worse. It does not merely host communication. It reorders salience, rewards outrage, confuses hesitation with desire, and keeps feeding stimuli back into the social field as if all engagement were endorsement. So it damages not only content environments but the producers and consumers inside them. It degrades judgment, distorts status, and undermines reciprocity. So the missing accounting is this: social media converted social fabric into extractable raw material, then returned the wear, conflict, demoralization, and radicalization as if they were nobody’s property loss. But they are. They are losses imposed on demonstrated interests people, families, and communities had already paid to build.

So something social media did, maybe especially Facebook, is flatten out the extremely complicated landscape of human relationships into "friends" or not. Basically anyone you ever met, including matriarchs and patriarchs of families, parents, etc., plus people you barely know or might work with or just met a couple times or had similar politics or random hobbies as all got dumped into "people I know," and the results were social bedlam. We don't interact in real life like everyone we know has the same social standing or would even be allowed to see how we act with other people in different social relationships. You wouldn't act in front of a respected grandmother the way you cut up with your boys or even work or political stuff. The inherent respect is bulldozed by the medium. The algorithms (and the AI driving them) are doing this kind of flattening out of a complicated and subtle landscape again. The results are already bad and will likely be bedlam. The thing doesn't know if you engaged or even just hesitated over, or shared, content because you liked it, hated it, were outraged by it, thought it was amusing but unimportant, had to sneeze, got talked to by a real person and paused your scroll, were confused by the content, etc., and then it just feeds you more of it like you liked it and want it shoveled into your brain. This isn't good. The same is true not just of content, though, but also of its producers. It's another weird kind of flattening and mixing of a complex social reality, now mixed with a lot of unreality too, and it's simply not good. It isn't just that it's unsatisfying or annoying, though. It's that it can radicalize, frustrate, demoralize, and primrose-path people into bad places psychologically very easily. I don't know what we should do with these technologies, but I don't find it surprising that we have such enormous apparent rises in social, spiritual, emotional, and psychological sicknesses since they've been introduced and become such an integral part of everyday life, and that's without the distraction, addiction, and inherently quasi-antisocial nature of the whole activity.

Truth isn’t one thing. It has a spectrum. At the top end, there’s tautological truth (“A = A”), then analytic truth (what follows validly inside a system), then empirical or operational truth (claims that survive testing against reality), then truthful testimony (what a person can presently warrant after due diligence), and below that the undecidable or still-underdetermined, where we do not yet have enough to warrant belief either way. So for belief, the standard shouldn’t be “I like this conclusion” or even “this seems meaningful.” It should be: what kind of truth-claim is this, what evidence can actually test it, and how much certainty does this context require? In this framework, decidability is the capacity to classify a claim as false, possibly true, or undecidable by the evidence available, and the required rigor rises with the stakes. That also means “belief” is not automatically dishonest when certainty is incomplete. What would be dishonest is asserting more warranty than you have. Truthfulness is giving testimony that has undergone due diligence against ignorance, error, bias, and deceit, while admitting the limits of what you can presently warrant. Without that, decidability collapses into narrative or preference. So my answer would be: truth is whatever survives the right kind of adversarial testing for the context; truthfulness is speaking only within what you can warrant; undecidable claims should be held provisionally, not dogmatically; and falsehood begins where people overclaim beyond their evidence or evade due diligence.

@PopularAutist That which pertains to reality = truth

Correction. I think only acceptable beliefs are the ones that are true. To say you believe something you know to be untrue is to be dishonest. If I believe something that is not true that is not acceptable.

@RokoMijic @jeremykauffman I get what you are saying but this approach often creates other problems with how things are documented and undermine your ability to cleanly make your case.

@jeremykauffman sorry to hear this but I would avoid arguing with police. Be polite and obey them in the moment and take legal action later

On April 4th, a likely mentally-ill African man was behaving erratically in a Market Basket parking lot. I exchanged words with him, encouraging him to leave both the parking lot and the beautiful state of New Hampshire entirely. For this, I was arrested. Neither of us came within physical reach of one another, and I expect the matter to be dropped by the city of Manchester. Additionally, I am exploring legal action against the city. This incident is yet another example of how our government treats mentally-ill and dangerous African men as saints, and how the police prevent decent men from maintaining order in American cities and towns. The footage of my arrest is below. As someone who loves New Hampshire and attempts to make our state look good, it embarrasses me that our police our this incompetent.

Infinite regression? Plural marriage in heaven? The priesthood ban?

Is there any evidence of consummation in any of the sealings Joseph was involved with? It seems to only be clear with Emma but all other sealings seem to be familial rather than marital in nature. Unless you have something I just haven’t seen yet. Admittedly this is an area where my knowledge is weak still.

@pimomormon Um no. I would not do that and I publicly would tell the truth.

Thing is: the #Mormon church could come out today and say Joseph Smith never practiced polygamy and most Mormons would fall in line and say that’s what the church has always taught. It’s Orwellian memory wiping.

What is the truth though? I thought it was actually very clear that he did practice polygany but it is a bit more confusing than I originally thought. Do you have any videos on the subject? He was sealed to men as well as women of varying ages and most people treat sealing as if it were a marriage that implies consummation but that isn’t how sealing is treated historically.

@JoahFussell @DavidJohnButler Fun fact: I was in a music video doing headspins as a juvenile delinquent lol.

@JoahFussell @DavidJohnButler Beat street 😎

Hard to believe I am going into my second retirement from seminary. It’s been a rewarding few years.

@LDSLaw You know you are just asking for it right? 😆

Folks: Lawyers don't lawyer all day and night, preferably. We actually enjoy talking like normal people, with words meaning their normal definitions and not the abstruse legal ones that might get used in a pleading or indictment or judicial opinion. Also, we don't treat conversations like presenting evidentiary exhibits in a courtroom. So I wish some of you folks would stop with the asshattery.

@JimeeLiberty @ConceptualJames Not all property is privet, the commons is multigenerational and to privatize it is a real theft (and one of the worst types of theft).

@ConceptualJames The solution to the problem is, as always, private property. Let the owner decide the bathroom rules on their property.

The reasonable person standard. It actually exists, no matter how much critical theory has tried to destroy it.

James’s post is not analysis. It is a framing device. He creates a false dialectic: “woke left” on one side, “woke right” on the other, then casts himself as the sober observer above both. But the trick is that the second category is largely synthetic. He invents a mirror-image enemy so he can absorb a wide range of criticism into a stigmatized box and dismiss it without answering it. That is the first deception. The second is that he defines both sides through mythic psychologies instead of concrete arguments. The “woke left” supposedly believes history is liberation from false consciousness. The “woke right” supposedly believes history is corruption from primordial purity. That sounds neat, but it is a false frame. Most serious critics of progressive ideology are not arguing that “older is automatically better.” They are arguing that some traditions encoded hard-won information, some institutions solved real coordination problems, and some modern reforms destroy what they cannot replace. That is not reverse-wokeness. That is historical judgment. Why frame it this way? Because dialectical strategy works by controlling the available opposites. If you can define the conflict, you can manage the conclusion. He gives the reader only two options: liberation myth or restoration myth. Then anyone who rejects the first can be shoved into the second. The real alternative — that history contains tradeoffs, gains, losses, adaptation, decay, and selection — disappears before the discussion even begins. That is false-dialectic messaging: manufacture two distorted poles, force dissent into one of them, then win by triangulation. Notice the language: “primordial selves,” “pristine,” “purity,” “going backwards.” Those are not neutral terms. They are contamination terms. He is not describing opponents and then criticizing them. He is loading the description so the criticism is smuggled in from the start. And this is where his method starts to resemble the thing he claims to oppose. One of the oldest Marxist rhetorical tricks is not just open lying, but strategic relabeling: redefine words, camps, and motives, then force reality through the new vocabulary. Once that happens, argument gets replaced by classification. You do not answer the opponent; you rename him into a category already condemned. “Reactionary,” “bourgeois,” “counterrevolutionary,” “false consciousness” — the label does the work before evidence does. “Woke right” is functioning that way here. It is not a precise analytic category. It is a quarantine label. Its purpose is to collapse distinctions, erase legitimate critique, and recode opponents as a mirror-image pathology. In other words: do not engage the argument about institutional decay, civilizational tradeoffs, moral asymmetry, or the failures of progress narratives. Just rename the critic and move on. That is not clarity. It is propaganda by taxonomy. The deepest lie in the post is the suggestion that the only alternative to progressive teleology is reactionary mythology. No. A person can reject the cult of the new without worshiping the old. A person can believe that some inherited norms were adaptive, some reforms were beneficial, some were destructive, and that history is not a salvation story in either direction. The serious position is not “newer is always better.” It is not “older is always better.” It is: what works, what scales, what preserves trust, what sustains cooperation, what tells the truth about human limits, and what survives contact with reality? James’s frame has to suppress that position, because once it appears, his whole construction collapses. Simply put: this is a false dialectic built to delegitimize criticism by manufacturing a mirror enemy. It uses loaded labels, category collapse, and motive-imputation to replace argument with framing. And in doing so, it borrows the same ideological method it pretends to expose: control the language, define the camps, and lie by taxonomy.

Woke Left sees history as an escape story, where progress means shedding the layers of false consciousness until we return to our primordial selves, hence the idea of "newer is automatically better." Woke Right sees history as the long, slow corruption of our pristine primordial selves, so making progress requires going backwards until we return to who we were meant to be so we can do progress right this time (by maintaining essential purity), hence the "older (in the right lines) is automatically better."

I love The Last Samurai as much as the next guy, but it’s not a right-wing movie. Just like the movie Avatar, it’s a remake of Dances With Wolves with Samurai instead of Indians or blue aliens. It takes a gang of murderous pagan thugs, terrorists, and warlords who were rightly conquered by western law and order, and paints them as noble savages, wise, serene, and in touch with nature. Imagine a film that painted the child-sacrificing Aztecs and Mayans as “noble” protectors of their “tradition.” Some right wingers have reacted to the progressive bias that “newer is automatically better” and replaced it with “older is automatically better.” Neither are true. “Embracing tradition” isn’t always right. Which tradition are you embracing? True conservatism doesn’t measure things by age or tradition or recency, but by truth.