I don’t care what people say, the most important historical event in my lifetime was the discovery and release of the lost Steely Dan tape containing The Second Arrangement
You can wear a mask and paint your face
You can call yourself the human race
You can wear a ç̸̴̵̴̸̵̷̧͖̋͠ø̶̵̸̵̴̷̸̸̸̲͇̫̌̾̉ł̵̴̸̴̶̴̩̼̃ ̵̵̵̸̸̴̫́̃Ī̵̶̵̶̴̵̸̴̲̣̼̀͋a̸̵̴̵̴̸̵̸̱̰̔͛̕ř̴̶̴̴̸̶̵̷̝͉̪́̈́ ̷̶̷̶̴̴̴̦͚̊̒ą̵̵̴̶̶̶̷̖̝͉͗ņ̷̶̴̴̸̷̨̹̒ð̵̵̸̷̶̶̵̟̹͗̈ ̶̵̸̷̷̷̶̶̹̘̠̅̇á̶̸̴̸̸̶̷̻͒́͐ ̶̵̴̷̴̵̷̣̈̾̕ť̶̸̶̶̴̴̡̅̎ī̷̵̸̵̷̧̚ę̷̴̶̴̵̸̸̷̘̖̒̈̆
One thing you can’t hide
Is when your picture’s AI
Why don’t you say “rule”?
What rules did I presume that Pascal did not? My rebuttal to Pascal was crafted to highlight the errors in his argument by abiding by the same errors in such a way that reverses the conclusion
If you can still log in, maybe making a series of edits to each comment to gradually turn them into nonsense wouldn’t trigger anything on Reddit’s side to undelete them or impede your editing.
Pascal’s Wager states that reason cannot determine which, if any, god(s) exist (although it’s commonly simplified to just the Christian God), so it is best to choose to believe in one particular arbitrary god on the off chance that that one particular god is real (and behaves like the Christian God). If by some fluke chance your guess is correct, you get eternal paradise in the Good Afterlife; if your guess is wrong, which it probably is if you were to forego any logical deduction in selecting from a vast pool of hypothetical gods and an infinite pool of gods that nobody has yet to even ideate of, then you would eternally suffer in the Bad Afterlife if the Other God exists, and you would experience no harm in the absence of an afterlife if no God exists. Pascal argued that the risks of reward vs. punishment meant that believing in God was the logical choice to for one to benefit oneself, rather than a belief in God being a logical choice of reality.
My rebuttal to this is that hypothetically only those who believe in an afterlife will necessarily go to the Bad Afterlife and suffer forever, whereas disbelievers in an afterlife will either go to the Good Afterlife or to no afterlife at all. This scenario may sound arbitrary and made up, but I don’t make the rules of the universe— that’s on a hypothetical and mysterious God to decide, if such one exists. The existence of a God/universe with rational or irrational motives to decide that those who believe in an afterlife must go to the Bad Afterlife forever… is as unknowable as the existence of Pascal’s God. Personally, I don’t believe in an afterlife since I wouldn’t want to take my chances with a belief in an afterlife dooming me to the Bad Afterlife, but my disbelief doesn’t make the hypothetical any less true. You may consider the possibility of such afterlife criteria to be an illogical assessment of reality, but Pascal also acknowledged that his wager is contingent upon foregoing a logical assessment of reality in favor of what would logically benefit oneself.
No Trinity is interested in him
Kinda getting an increasingly strong troll vibe ngl. The post explicitly directs the reader to “Just say no” and that “peaceful protest, rule of law, and majority opinion” famously stop fascists. Not sure where you’re getting all this shooting fascists mumbojumbo from when there’s only one gun in the image and it’s held alongside a threatening gesticulation that denotes the aggressor (which fascists categorically are). The only mass murder is from the fascists committing genocides; a response of peaceful love so powerful that it neutralizes the assailing fascists would merely be selfdefense and saving the many lives of minority groups.
See this post:
It is special how consistently you produce a bad faith response with the intent to absolve you from providing a valid justification for your point of view
Have you heard of the Holocaust?
Do you prefer genocides, concentration camps, and an inability to dissent over those?
If I was so sure, then I wouldn’t have done further research
Hmm. The art style, the sharp edges, the contrasting color palette, and the fuzzy background made me think that this image was AI-generated, drawing on a mix of the corporate art style and the Orwellian art style. The figures in the bottom corners that look like they have a🗿for a head really sold the idea to me, and the caption’s color, font choice, and Title Case formatting didn’t help. After seeking reassurance from a couple of AI-gen detection sites that claimed it was likely human-made, I used TinEye.com to find the oldest source of the image I could.
Turns out it was made by Pandagolik1 back in 2022. Kudos to the artist for predicting a dystopian corporate propaganda aesthetic so precisely.
Trump has taken up one and taken down the other
Hmmm…
Gabriel is my favorite artist and Genesis is my favorite band. I looked over other people’s reasoning for this interpretation, and it doesn’t seem 100% right to me.
I think the foremost metaphor in the song is about willful subjugation to religious/spiritual ideals and aspirations, so much so that the believer constantly crawls on their hands and knees in the foolish hope that it will bring them to a higher place spiritually, but these acts only impair them in both the Earthly and Heavenly realms. The references to climbing are about aspirations for a spiritual ascension, and the references to birth are about religious rebirth that puts the foolish believer right back to where they started without any progress made. The believers must “get in” to the highest echelon of piety/aether/magnificence “to get out” of mortal rebirth/suffering/existence/banality. This would track with Gabriel’s history of personal spiritualism and religious references, as well as the self-discovery theme of the album. The descriptions of scenery are to evoke how the environment/world/universe is lush and royal yet the believers themselves are tiny and insignificant. The album also intentionally makes constant leaps between settings and themes, which would make the very direct “Counting Out Time” unlikely to precede a song that is also sexual in nature. And when Gabriel sings about sex, it usually lacks subtlety.
Ascending the staircase to the next song, “The Chamber of 32 Doors”, Rael encounters those who incorrectly believe themselves to have found enlightenment and who seek to peddle their maligned ideologies to others. However, only “Lilywhite Lilith” can find the way of truth due to her lack of arrogance (on account of her being blind and pure).
However, Gabriel is a fantastic poet and lyricist and loves a dirty joke. The sperm theory is plausible as a secondary metaphor, but in the context of the story, who or what is being fertilized/born? As this song follows Rael’s coitus, it would follow that it would be a progeny of Rael that would be birthed, yet this cannot be the case since the rest of the story follows Rael and acknowledges that the character the audience stays with is John’s brother.
I’d argue that, barring “Counting Out Time”, “Steam” is probably Gabriel’s most explicitly sexual song, mimicking “Sledgehammer” without as artful of symbolisms.
I thought the pet play song you linked to would be “I Wanna Be Your Dog” by The Stooges.
There are also other more directly sexual songs by contemporaries. “So Deep Within You” by The Moody Blues, “I’m In You” by Peter Frampton, “Pearl Necklace” by ZZ Top, and many Frank Zappa songs, for example.
Thinking about that time I posted online that it was my last day of college classes so I could only get dumber from there on out, and someone I hadn’t talked to since high school wrote a reply in agreement and my response to them was “It’s like what Smash Mouth said: ‘Your brain gets smart, but your head gets dumb’”
Sabrina Carpenter not being a member of the Carpenters hits me like Ice Spice not being a member of the Spice Girls
Violence against the state? My word, that’s illegal and therefore bad. Violence committed by the state, however, is very legal and very cool.
> we start organizing
> tuned the fuck out for decades
If you’re just now getting started with pacifistic resistance at the point where reporters, peaceful protesters, and members of the “opposition” party are each being arrested and shot, then peaceful opposition faces the same recourse as violent opposition so it’s best to just use the option that will actually stop some, if not all, oppressors. We’re also at the point where literal and direct calls for freedom itself are being criminalized as exemptions to free speech. The general cause in the US has been going since the country’s inception; if somebody’s not tuned in by this point, don’t hold your breath waiting for them to tune in before they believe it’s their own neck on the line.
> the last third
The state is already actively deporting, detaining, disarming, and ultimately decimating this opposition third. If there is no stoppage soon, numbers and means of exerting opposition will dwindle to a band of radicals too small and unarmed to effectively harm the state. The people remaining either won’t speak out due to fear of facing the same consequences of dissidence or they’ll think that they’re good and safe for cheering for the state.
Sympathy cannot be garnered from outside forces if they can miss hearing of and thinking about the instances and forms of oppression to begin with. The message against oppression would have to be clear and impossible for the media to avoid, and peaceful protests are both often ignored by those going on their own day unbothered and often represented on the news in a way that is neither accurate nor thorough.
Heaven forbid the opposition third quickly forms a covert and well-armed rebel group which utilizes strategy, stealth, and weaponry to reduce the numbers and armament of the oppressors and stunt their growth of power while the majority of the opposition third operates as a pacifistic front, ultimately leading to an eventual recapturing of the state by force in a coup that the majority of people now supports due to seeing the rebel group’s showy acts which unavoidably display the horrors of the previous state. That would just be terrible! If we’re lucky, the oppressive state will act fast enough to keep us safe from this peril by getting rid of such means of ever overcoming them by means of violent force and allow us to wallow in our peaceful protests that we can’t actually voice, report on, or pass legislation for without being shot or arrested.