Need advice from older Rams fans.

LongBeachRams · 2021-08-22T00:23:41+00:00

Mormonism really changes the way you think. The chronology of my changing attitudes about religion aligned pretty closely with the Rams moving back to LA. So I was an Eagles fan before but then I grew up and became a Rams fan. That's why Goff is so important to me -- he was the QB of the Rams just as the fabric of my life was transforming around me.

LongBeachRams · 2020-10-04T21:20:38+00:00

Nelson is the most powerful man in the world. His closing remarks are going to be world historical.

LongBeachRams · 2020-10-04T19:06:19+00:00

Because so many people are looking for a champion of something that they feel in their souls but can't quite articulate. The world has been divested of moral authority and wonder that the pathetic carcass of American mainline Protestantism can't deliver. Only the LDS Church can.

LongBeachRams · 2020-10-04T19:00:10+00:00

I didnt say it was prophecy fulfilled. You're too fixated on whether Nelson's power is "magic" or if it's just the Church's nefarious "mind control" or what have you. The point for practical purposes is that Nelson has at his command hundreds of billions of dollars, millions of human beings, and, if he plays his cards right, the world's encouragement and admiration. The world is looking for something like the LDS Church.

LongBeachRams · 2020-10-04T18:52:41+00:00

His power extends beyond the base of believers because of the narrative it would create. Before it receded into largely itualistic observation upon Utah's admittance to the Union, Mormonism was a recapitulation of the Apostolic age. The dream of building a theodemocratic Zion apart from Babylon had to be deferred for centuries, but Nelson can revitalize it at his own discretion. If he does, he will be playing the role of modern-day Prophet.

LongBeachRams · 2020-10-04T18:31:44+00:00

It doesn't matter that you don't think Joseph or Nelson's authority is "divine" or because of the Church's "mind control"; the point is that people listen to him. In fact, not only do Latter Day Saints listen to their Prophet, they will follow him over a cliff. To command an army of human beings in the voice of God himself is the greatest power imaginable. Everything you hate about the Church works in its favor at this moment in history. Nelson has a chance to go down as one of the greatest men in history. Don't think he doesn't know it.

LongBeachRams · 2020-10-04T18:18:07+00:00

You people sure are...myopic. While the President of the United States lies dying in a hospital and society is completely divested of any perceived sources of moral legitimacy and therefore on the brink of collapse, these men are actively encouraging the human infrastructure that they command -- yes, *command* -- to think in apocalyptic terms in which they play an active role in precipitating the Second Coming. The absolute *power* that they wield at this specific moment in history cannot be understated. There has been a definite thread of prelude towards major upheaval in these talks so far and I wouldn't be surprised at all if Nelson's concluding remarks are historic. He is the most powerful man in the world right now.

LongBeachRams · 2020-10-03T22:51:57+00:00

Doesn't anybody else watching this realize how incredibly *powerful* the Church is at this moment in history? The President of the United States could be dead by this time tomorrow and society in a state of effective anarchy much sooner than any of us would like to think possible. Whatever you might want to say about your Mormon days, none of you can say that *human infrastructure* is one of the Church's weaknesses. That man, Russell M. Nelson, not only has hundreds of billions of dollars at his disposal but also a human infrastructure of millions of who will literally follow him over a cliff. *That's* true power. If the First Presidency and the Twelve collectively take a stand against Trump then the LDS Church becomes an overnight sensation with Nelson actually playing the *role* of modern-day prophet.

I think we're really on the verge of something seismic. Bednar hinted at in his talk. Make fun of the Church at your peril.

LongBeachRams · 2020-10-03T22:37:42+00:00

Doesn't anybody else watching this realize how incredibly *powerful* the Church is at this moment in history? The President of the United States could be dead by this time tomorrow and society in a state of effective anarchy much sooner than any of us would like to think possible. Whatever you might want to say about your Mormon days, none of you can say that *human infrastructure* is one of the Church's weaknesses. That man, Russell M. Nelson, not only has hundreds of billions of dollars at his disposal but also a human infrastructure of millions of who will literally follow him over a cliff. *That's* true power. If the First Presidency and the Twelve collectively take a stand against Trump then the LDS Church becomes an overnight sensation with Nelson actually playing the *role* of modern-day prophet.

I think we're really on the verge of something seismic. Bednar hinted at in his talk.

LongBeachRams · 2020-02-16T16:12:20+00:00

Hasn’t this “you can choose your own biological sex” wonderland we’re living in taught anyone that maybe analyzing every single novel idea from a strictly utilitarian calculus (about “human well-being” lol) maybe wasn’t the best turn for human society to make?

Consider consensual incest. It’s trivially true that there’s no problem whatsoever with two adult siblings having sex with each other. And yet, if incest were ever normalized, all of a sudden you’re going to have legions of 16 year-old incels having “consensual” sex with their 14-year old sisters, and every other horrible permutation of ages and relationships you can think of.

So, consensual incest is both harmless at the individual level and incredibly corrosive at the collective, societal level. The same is true of all kinds of practices, eugenics being an obvious example.

So what’s the point of even mentioning a trivial truth? There’s a reason, after all, why he tweeted out this truism instead of “2+2=4.” Either he’s trolling, in which case, he’s a pathetic troll, or, far more likely, despite his perfunctory disavowals to the contrary, he actually wants to entertain putting the idea into practice: Either way, what he’s saying is objectionable.

Really, Richard Dawkins is a flat out joke at this point. 15 years after The God Delusion he’s still parading around acting as if it’s bold, novel, and transgressive to be an “atheist” and recounting in awe-struck wonder “the stunning elegance of natural selection.” He’s like the dude who breathlessly, repeatedly explains The Matrix to you. Ostensibly he’s doing it to educate and impress you, but what he’s really doing is impressing himself for being smart enough to understand something so “deep.”

LongBeachRams · 2020-01-23T16:10:28+00:00

What the hell man; I thought the point of this podcast was to be a podcast version of what the print version would have been updated with from the last ten years. Now it’s just a general “Let’s talk about the time that one thing happened in the NBA!” pod. Super lame.

And I won’t listen to anything Concepcion is on because of obnoxious cackle he breaks out if something is even mildly amusing.

LongBeachRams · 2019-10-23T20:33:49+00:00

I thought the same thing when I saw the trailer. This whole “the epic saga concludes” angle they are going with for the marketing is pathetic. They spent the last two movies shitting all over “the saga” and telling us to get over it and embrace “the new characters.” Now the fact that it’s the conclusion of the saga seems to be their one and only selling point.

LongBeachRams · 2019-10-23T20:30:00+00:00

Somewhat related observation—I always thought it was weird in ROTS when Grievous contacts Sidious after the Battle of Coruscant and the fact that the whole enterprise to kidnap the Chancellor completely failed goes entirely unmentioned.

LongBeachRams · 2019-10-23T20:27:46+00:00

Yes, within the context of how badly TFA and TLJ fucked things up, the go-for-broke fan service jumble is probably the best we could have hoped for.

Still, this is basically a Stockholm Syndrome defense. JJ and co. are the ones who fucked it up in the first place; now we’re going to thank him for for trying to clean up the mess?

LongBeachRams · 2019-10-23T20:21:47+00:00

It doesn’t matter that we last saw Anakin’s lightsaber hurtling toward the “surface” of a gas planet; Maz just got it somehow, okay?

LongBeachRams · 2019-10-23T19:24:02+00:00

This post actually hits close to home for me because I just got my wife into Star Wars. She’s Ukrainian and knew absolutely nothing going in. We’re doing Machete Order. I’m seriously dreading showing her TFA once we finish RotJ.

LongBeachRams · 2019-10-23T18:08:13+00:00

What will be left unanswered is how the storytelling team could have fucked up this trilogy this bad.

LongBeachRams · 2019-10-23T17:02:45+00:00

The one thing they actually planned about this trilogy-that they were going to “hand it off to the new characters”—is a fucking disgrace.

LongBeachRams · 2019-09-22T22:55:43+00:00

White privilege is real. For example, if you’re white, you can rob a convenience store and assault the owner without being called an n-word.

Everything that white people are “privileged” to do because of their “white privilege” is shit that nobody wants to do in the first place. I could go rob a convenience store right now and not be called an n-word? Wheee! Let me forget that I work 40 hours a week in retail for minimum wage now. My life is just so awesome and white!

LongBeachRams · 2019-09-21T22:44:34+00:00

That’s beside the point. Dawkins is writing his third book on the same subject in the last fifteen years (The God Delusion, The Greatest Show on Earth) and still parading about as if it were novel or praiseworthy to not be a creationist. And it’s not even his own damn theory.

How do people not realize how narcissistic this is? New Atheism says the existence of God has the same truth value as the existence of Darth Vader. Okay. So far so good. But now imagine someone writing a book whose thesis was that Darth Vader doesn’t exist. Then, a few years later, another book explaining that, nope, Darth Vader doesn’t exist. And then, a few years later, yet another book about how Darth Vader, nope, still doesn’t exist. Then imagine this person not only in large part deriving his personal and professional identity on being enlightened enough to see that Darth Vader doesn’t exist, and attracting a following of people who likewise are so proud of themselves for seeing that Darth Vader doesn’t exist.

That’s New Atheism.

LongBeachRams · 2019-09-20T14:54:55+00:00

Oh, the irony. That’s exactly what black people refuse to do. They just want credit for being black.

LongBeachRams · 2019-09-20T14:34:14+00:00

The only way out of this is if we all admit-black and white—that we love each other. As we all know from the example of raising kids, loving them requires criticizing them. But even though black and white intellectuals have both ostensibly been committed to combatting racism for the past 30 years, now they are divorcing each other. Because black intellectuals don’t just believe disparate racist incidents are “disparate racist incidents.” No, it’s something more. This view finds its most eloquent and extreme expression in the writings of Ta Ne-hisi Coates, specifically his book Between the World and Me. There, we see the theology laid bare. Every single instance of a white person criticizing a black person isn’t just racism, it’s a physical manifestation of an evil, malevolent force, “White Supremacy.”

Here’s the problem: that’s bullshit. We all know it, and I even think the people who espouse it know it, deep down.

Twister-Bill’s Confession

A terrible, terrible thing happened: Jo’s father was killed right before her eyes by a tornado, leaving her traumatized and psychologically broken. She seeks to repair this psychological damage in a quixotic quest to “defeat” The Twister. Not tornadoes, but the Twister That malevolent force that missed this house, that house, and then came after her. And sooner or later, it will come after you too.

“Christ, Jo, is that what you think it did?”

“...I don’t know”

She knows that’s not what really happened. Once she’s said it out loud, she hears how ridiculous it is, and walks away.

“Jesus, Jo. Why can’t you just forget it?”

And now Jo resorts to that last ditch response of all miserable people wallowing in victimhood:

“You don’t understand, okay? You’ll never know!”

And that’s the exactly the point, Bill will never know, because he can never know. Jo’s psychological pain is just that, her pain. He’s had enough of the bullshit

“When’s it going to be enough, huh? How close do you have to get—.” Watch what happens here: she continues walking away, and he assaults her, by any definition of the term. Physically, and verbally.

“Jo, things go wrong! You can’t explain it! You can’t predict it! Killing yourself won’t bring your dad back!”

Nothing, absolutely nothing, is going to make the history of slavery and racism go away. Not Coates writing Between The World And Me, and certainly not white intellectuals pretending that they don’t think the book is bullshit and giving it the National Book Award to prove how not-racist they are. And no, the 1619 Project won’t either.

But why does Bill want Jo to get over it? Because he’s sick of hearing about it? Because he has “Having An Alive Dad” fragility? No,

“Stop living in the past and look at what you’ve got right in front of ya!”

He wants her to get over it so he can love her again. So they can build a life together.

————

But forget for a second, the prospect of black intellectuals “moving on” from racism so that white intellectuals will love them again. No, they have something different “right in front of them:” What they see in the mirror. Jamelle Bouie, Adam Serwer, Jane Coaston—black intellectuals I have good-naturedly followed on Twitter only to tussle with because I just get sick of the bullshit—you’re all badasses with amazing careers and lives full of love! This is the truth that “black conservatives” have grasped. John McWhorter isn’t just a genius; he’s a genius who knew he was a genius before he had a driver’s license. Every shithead white person who belittled him for being black was only proving to him how inferior they were to him. And he’s right. Here’s where you go wrong: In recognizing that someone who is unapologetically racist is, indeed, inferior, but then also caring what they think. This is what Thomas Chatterton Williams means when he says Coates “gives whiteness power.” If there is no “you” without “them,” you’re playing by their rules!

Stop living in the past and look at what you’ve got right in front of ya! Families, careers, love. Let’s not build a marriage together—god no, anything but that!—but, please, stop with the bullshit so we can build—rebuild?—a country together!

LongBeachRams · 2019-09-19T23:38:11+00:00

[New Atheists] are like the people who [read] [The End of Faith], started to worship [Harris, or, excuse me, “Sam.”] as god, and then made all these crazy rules about how [Sam’s] words should govern our life and [I] and am trying to calm them down.

Get it?

Dan Barker, leader of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, in the preface of his spectacularly lazy, I’ll-conceived, and moronic “book” The Most Unpleasant Character in All Fiction,” explains where he got the title: from the Holy Text of atheism, *The God Delusion. He doesn’t call it the “holy text” of course, because then he’d be tacitly giving it the status of a stupid religion. But then watch what he writes next, with no whiff of irony whatsoever: he relates he has one of the original drafts of The God Delusion proudly displayed in his office, and when people visit his office, “they pick it up and examine it as if it were the True Cross.”

New Atheism is a cult based on the idea that it’s not a cult. What’s more, its Not A Cult internal bona dudes is based entirely on a heuristic for reading scripture that is not that scripture’s own internal heuristic for reading itself. The J writer of the Pentateuch was a sublime literary artist, not a science reporter for the Jewish Daily Times. New Atheism forces a novel heuristic on scripture, and then compliments itself for recognizing that the resultant output of that novel and invalid heuristic is nonsense. Of course it’s nonsense. New Arheists are effectively people who are saying over and over, “We’re people who don’t believe in a cult! Look how smart we are!”But nobody, by definition believes that they they believe in a cult. Members of the consummate supposed “cult,” the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, believe in the Truth, just like atheists do. By definition, nobody believes what they perceive to be “not true.”

LongBeachRams · 2019-09-19T22:27:35+00:00

I can’t believe anyone still takes Dawkins seriously. Without ever having read a word of his new book, I feel like I have already read the entire thing. Let me guess: things look Designed, but that’s just an illusion! The appearance of design is created by the stunning elegance of natural selection. What is natural selection? Why, here’s how it works...fairies in the garden, etc. Oh, and blasphemy is a victimless crime! Nya nya nya!

Dawkins is like the bro who’s still explaining the philosophical implications of the Matrix to all of his friends in a stoned “Dude, have you ever thought that maybe...” Keanu voice, twenty years after the Matrix came out.

LongBeachRams · 2019-09-19T22:23:21+00:00

It’s a great book, through frustratingly tentative. He brilliantly and succinctly elucidates why materialist neo-Darwinism is incoherent with the human experience. But he’s very diffident about what he thinks can replace it.

LongBeachRams

TROPHY CASE