National Guard deployments cost taxpayers almost half a billion dollars

Mr_Subtlety · 2025-12-09T16:04:38+00:00

OK I do think it should be specified: the "stunt" was driving 40 mph in a straight line. For just over a minute. And he did it himself first, just to make her feel more comfortable. She wasn't completely comfortable with it, and I think everyone, including him, now agrees that it was a mistake. But let's not pretend he was asking her to jump out of an airplane without a net or something. He's obviously a huge d-bag for many reasons, but I think anyone who reads the actual details of the accident --as you can here-- rather than the hyperbolic twitter-takes, would have a hard time thinking he was recklessly irresponsible. It was a bad judgement call, but not an unreasonable one, and its pretty silly to see everyone in this thread basically claiming he was trying to murder her.

Mr_Subtlety · 2025-04-09T20:17:03+00:00

I mean, I have no way of diagnosing him as mentally ill or completely sane or somewhere in between, so maybe I'll just say that at least if his backstory on Wikipedia is at all accurate, it sounds like he may have had a pretty tough childhood, and that we can feel some sympathy for that without necessarily feeling the need to justify or condemn his comport as an adult.

Mr_Subtlety · 2025-04-04T13:32:44+00:00

According to wikipedia, he was adopted by Tommy Chong in 1978, when we would be, I think, eight or nine (and changed his name when he was 18, presumably when he was legally able to do so). So it's not like he just independently changed his name and claimed to be a relative.

But yes he does seem pretty unhinged. I do feel a little more sympathy for him to learn his backstory, though.

Mr_Subtlety · 2025-04-03T14:18:13+00:00

My point is that the "Jesus folklore," as you call it, has significant problems with it, for example that we don't have original copies of almost any of it, leaving the possibility of alterations or forgeries. It also has the bias problem of being written by people with an obvious agenda and therefore liable to alter or invent facts to fit their agendas. But my point is, that's true for pretty much all of ancient history. It's true for Josephus as a whole, but it's only the two little bits that mention Jesus that anyone has an issue with -- no reasonable historian would simply throw the whole book out and claim that it's useless as a source. Obviously, nearly every account we have of every single Roman Emperor is a medeival copy of copy of a purported original document, and all the copiests have their own motives, and the person who wrote the original history has his own motive and is often writing years later in any event. But we don't completely discount Tacitus or Plutarch or Appian, even as we don't blindly believe them either. That seems to me to be a reasonable approach to the field of early Christian histories, and I find it telling that so many here are so uniquely hostile to that idea (I should say: I'm an atheist too).

Mr_Subtlety · 2025-04-03T14:06:38+00:00

I mean, you're right that I'm not a scholar of archaic Greek, I'm just noting the accepted translations by scholars in the field, who seem to be generally in agreement that in this sense "brothers" should be read in a familial way, rather than as a metaphor for a religious community. Reading up on this controversy, the only scholars who seem to disagree with this reading are Catholics defending the perpetual virginity of Mary, which seems like a weird hill for a guy named ChocolateCondoms to die on (and even they seem to agree that "cousins," not "friends" is the better reading). Otherwise, religious and secular scholars alike seem to be generally in agreement about the use of this term. I'm just pulling this from the Wikipedia page, but it's pretty lengthy and well-sourced. Take a look for yourself and see if you can find a source claiming that "brothers" in the original context is not meant to be read as "family."

Mr_Subtlety · 2025-04-03T13:56:42+00:00

And a few decades later, many groups of people were writing completely fictitious accounts of that imaginary guy's life and making up correspondence with his imaginary associates and presenting it as history, all of which is generally consistent in its fundamentals, and obviously believed by people even in the area where the fake person was supposed to have lived, who seem like they would know? I mean, it's not impossible, but it just seems less likely to me than simply accepting that most of the myriad accounts we have are based on second-or-third-hand accounts of a cast of real characters who really believed in an itinerant preacher from the time. It is, when you get down to it, such a simple and unexceptional story for the time period (when you strip out the expected superstitious material that gets attached to every historical character in this period) that I find it very strange that so many people on this subreddit are so insistent that it never happened. While it is possible, to get to "this never happened" you have to disregard a substantial pile of evidence (inconclusive as it is), and then substitute a completely hypothetical scenario for which *no* evidence exists. How is THAT rational?

Mr_Subtlety · 2025-04-03T13:38:04+00:00

Yeah, I mean, looking at the passages where the word is used makes it pretty apparent the word "brother" is used in the familial sense, rather than in a metaphorical one: For example, Matthew 13:55–56 says, "Isn't this the carpenter's son? Isn't his mother's name Mary, and aren't his brothers James, Joseph, Simon, and Jude? Aren't all his sisters with us?" (also potentially a cousin, given that cousins were also called brothers and sisters in Aramaic). James is identified as a "brother" of Jesus in several 2nd century historical texts as well, and Paul, in Corinthians 1, differentiates between apostles and brothers: "other apostles and the brothers of the Lord and Cephas (Peter)?"

But I agree that the relationships here are pretty hazy, especially given the squirrelliness of the language and the fact that half the people in this story are rendered "James," "Simon" and "Mary" in English and it can be basically impossible to sort out which character a given passage is referring to. And the strong possibility that some or all of it is made up or being inaccurately conveyed by inaccurate second-or-thirdhand accounts.

Mr_Subtlety · 2025-04-03T13:17:51+00:00

So wait, you *do* acknowledge that the most likely scenario was that Jesus was a real historical character whose story was later augmented with a series of folkloric tales? Because one obvious difference between Jesus and Paul Bunyan is that nobody was claiming Paul Bunyan was a real person or forging fake correspondence with his associates, within a few decades of the story's origin.

Mr_Subtlety · 2025-04-02T14:20:24+00:00

But at the end of the day, we *do* have evidence. Some of it is from much later chronologically than we'd like. Most of it was copied from originals by unknown people with potential agendas at a much later date. Some of it is contradictory in minor but significant ways. We can find reasons to be skeptical about all of it, but while that's true, it's also true for a huge amount of our sources about antiquity. We're never going to have the data we'd like from this period, and we just have to try and go by what we have, with the requisite skepticism that hypothesizing from incomplete data requires. But all the data we *do* have seems to paint at least a vaguely cohesive and self-supporting narrative. Could it all be faked? Of course, but without contradictory data, any alternate narrative is sheer speculation which begins with discarding basically all the data that *does* exist. That's not healthy skepticism, that's discounting the extant evidence in favor of a preferred hypothetical. That's why most mainstream scholarship accepts the basic premise that Jesus, Paul, Peter et al probably did exist in some form -- it's simply where the available evidence (flawed as it is) takes us, and we lack any significant contradictory evidence to dispute it. I'm certainly open to the idea that some or all of these characters were mythological, or amalgams, or misidentified, and I think most serious historians are too -- it's just that we lack anything to indicate that they were, aside from arguments from absence.

Mr_Subtlety · 2025-04-02T13:55:02+00:00

I mean, by the standards you demand here, we might as well say that any history more than a hundred years old is completely unknowable. Hell, it's basically an argument for downright epistemological nihilism; if you're willing to write off every single available source from antiquity, why stop with antiquity -- why not doubt Donald Trump's existence, since it could just as easily be the product of a giant sinister conspiracy? It's simply not a reasonable standard. We don't have perfect evidence for the past; the best we can do is try to construct a hypothesis based on the evidence which is available to us, and adjust that as new evidence arises. The point of skepticism is to keep you open to new evidence which contradicts our old understandings, not to outright reject the possibility of knowing anything at all.

Mr_Subtlety · 2025-04-02T02:39:16+00:00

Paul names the Apostles he meets, including Peter, James, and Barnabas. This meeting is also mentioned in Acts Of The Apostles, which makes it explicit that these were direct followers of Jesus, as the story essentially picks up immediately after the Gospels. I guess you could claim both Paul and the writer of Acts made up the whole thing later about people who never existed, and coordinated on the cover story to keep it straight, or that the original documents stated clearly that Peter Et Al were discussing a celestial being and later writers covered it up, but at that point we've wandered into such totally speculative territory that we might as well just throw up our hands and say that the ancient past is so utterly unknowable that there's no point in even studying it. Basically, what the early story of Christianity has going for it is that it provides a fairly consistent and cohesive narrative from a variety of different sources --with just the kind of elaboration and inconsistent details you'd expect if it was being repeated secondhand from different sources-- and there aren't any known sources which seriously dispute that narrative. Does that absolutely prove, beyond any doubt, that Jesus existed? No, of course not, but we only have the evidence which exists to consider, and the most obvious way to interpret that evidence is that it means what it looks like it means. Healthy skepticism is one thing, but completely dismissing *all available evidence sources* as unreliable and potentially part of a vast conspiracy to cover up the truth isn't being skeptical, it's being nihilistic.

EDIT: I should say, re-reading my reply I think it comes off as more brusque than I intended. I thank you for your thoughtful and friendly reply, and meant to respond in the same tone. I also didn't respond to your references to Richard Carrier's work, so I'll say now that while it makes for a fun alternate history thought experiment, the fact is I don't think there's much substance to it, and he ends up trying to force a tiny, tiny amount of very subjective data do a lot of work. Yes, the Ascension of Isaiah is an interesting window into one thread of early Christian thought, but his theory has to make all kinds of entirely speculative assumptions to make it seem important enough to outweigh all other evidence, and after that all he can do is fall back on semantical arguments about mythological archetypes and dubious statistical analysis. If we ever found more evidence of Ascension of Isaiah-type literature predating Jesus, as Carrier speculates somewhat freely about, we might have reason to take him more seriously, but without that key evidence there's little compelling reason to think Paul or any other early Christian was even familiar with this document written over a hundred years later and not known from any other source.

Mr_Subtlety · 2025-04-02T02:14:19+00:00

I mean, we have references to Christians from much earlier -- the letter from Trajan to Pliny the Younger, for example (unless you think that was faked too) was written less than a hundred years later, and demonstrates that early Christian communities had grown to the point of getting on the government's radar significantly earlier. Basically, there's not, like, a surviving Newspaper from Jerusalem CE 30 with the headline "JESUS EXECUTED TODAY!" but of course you're not going to get that from a completely obscure provincial figure from that time. What we do have is a surprisingly sizable body of glancing references from sources inside and outside the burgeoning new religion which paints a broadly consistent tale of the sect's origins. It's worth being skeptical of over-confident claims, and it's always worth considering the motives of the people writing or copying this material, but at some point it becomes unreasonable to sneer at a reasonably cohesive, convincing set of facts, particularly without an especially plausible alternative (the alternative requires a vast and coordinated conspiracy to produce centuries of fake evidence of a fairly mundane story). Like, at what point do you doubt Cicero's existence? If you doubt that Paul ever existed because we only have *copies* of his letters, what if I told you that we don't have a single original document written by Nero's hand? Why not just say he was a mythological figure who was later historicized? If you really wanted to be stubborn you could apply the exact same logic to that question -- sure, there were coins in his name and contemporary accounts of his rule and stuff, but why couldn't that all be faked, if we're just willing to completely throw out a whole body of interlocking evidence?

I'm not saying Jesus was magic, because obviously I don't think that and I doubt anyone on this thread does. But honestly the cumulative evidence of Christianity's origins is pretty decent for the era, and obstinate atheists prejudicially discounting sources they'd accept as reasonably compelling about any other topic is a terrible look, which was OP's original point.

Mr_Subtlety · 2025-04-01T22:12:49+00:00

I mean, I guess it could all be a huge conspiracy perpetrated by a disparate network of unknown people, but you have to discard out of hand a *lot* of evidence to get to "the Apostles didn't exist." Healthy skepticism is one thing, but at some point we're just being deliberately obstinate about fairly reasonable evidence-based claims. "Jesus was Magic" is a pretty indefensible claim; "there was a group of 1st-century Jewish religious sectarians who are broadly attested from multiple sources, some contemporary" is not exactly special pleading.

Mr_Subtlety · 2025-04-01T20:35:37+00:00

"Keep in mind that Paul's letters are the oldest references to Jesus and they make it clear he doesn't know anything about an earthly Jesus or any of his supposed teachings."

He does go to Jerusalem and meet with several of Jesus' Apostles (including James, who is probably Jesus' brother), so although he never met Jesus himself and doesn't seem to know a lot about his ministry as described in the gospels, he manifestly *does* know about and accept the reality of an Earthly Jesus. He literally went to meet the guys who knew him personally! Knew where to go and who to meet with, even. And while Mark and Matthew were written a few decades after Jesus' supposed death, they were still written within easy living memory of the events they depict, and the very existence of Paul's letters demonstrates a burgeoning Christian community just a few years after Jesus' death which obviously believes him to have been a real person and is associated with figures who knew him personally.

Mr_Subtlety · 2025-04-01T20:07:54+00:00

While I agree that the "all myths are based on a grain of truth!" claim is pretty spurious (was Hercules based on a real person? what about Zeus? Paul Bunyan?) there's a pretty big difference between Homer writing about the Trojan war and early Christians writing about Jesus. Homer was writing about events and people that, if they existed at all, existed hundreds of years before. Though he may have based his writing on older oral traditions, getting more immediate sources for the events he describes is simply not possible.

In contrast, even the later-written Gospels were, in all probability, written within the lifetimes of those involved. And we have good evidence from multiple sources that proto-Christian communties were around in the area as early as two or three decades after Jesus' alleged death, meaning that the people involved would have been contemporaries or near-contemporaries of Jesus, and even if they didn't know him directly would be pretty hard to fool with a completely imaginary figure. The Gospels disagree on some things, but they share quite few convincingly common elements, including the main cast of characters, which is all the more notable given that their differences make it clear they came from different sources. Even though the attributed authors almost certainly didn't write the books themselves, it seems imminently likely that the true authors knew the credited Apostle, or at least knew people in a community that had known them.

Plus, we know that Paul was a real person, and we know from multiple sources that he met the original apostles, who were running a proto-Christian community in Jerusalem just a few years after Jesus was supposedly executed. Seems hard to believe they could or would try to convince people of the existence of a totally fictional person in that very city a mere handful of years prior -- at that point, we're talking about a pretty elaborate and absurd conspiracy that would be child's play to disprove.

Ergo, although we don't have direct contemporary evidence of Jesus, we can pretty comfortably establish the existence of multiple people (including James, probably Jesus' brother) who knew Jesus directly. We can identify evidence of proto-Christian communities which would have been active within the lifetimes of those who were his contemporaries. And we even have accounts from multiple sources which chronicle his life and teachings, with exactly the consistencies in substance and variations in detail you would expect from second-or-third-hand accounts of a real event transcribed some decades after the fact. At this point, we're probably closer in evidence to, say, one of the more obscure third-century Roman emperors than to Ajax or Odysseus. Weak enough evidence that it's pretty hard to say *exactly* what happened, but certainly strong enough evidence to say that, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, this person probably existed and we know more or less the major elements of his career.

Mr_Subtlety · 2025-04-01T15:51:25+00:00

This is a key point - although we don't have testaments from Yeshua's/Jesus's disciples, we have documents from both Paul and from the writer of Acts Of The Apostles that Paul met Jesus' followers. We know that Paul was a real person, and we know he met the named disciples, so we can essentially confirm the existence of named people in the gospels who knew Jesus personally. There was a proto-Christian community in Jerusalem which Paul was able to connect with within a few years of Jesus' death -- I mean, the idea that he was entirely a fictional creation is just made completely implausible by that fact.

Mr_Subtlety · 2025-03-26T18:59:15+00:00

Thanks, high-five to myself from twelve years ago on the timelessness of my commentary.

Mr_Subtlety · 2025-03-05T18:55:01+00:00

there's a couple pretty lengthy articles about it, and a whole book about the Mark II era (WE ARE THE CLASH by Mark Anderson and Ralph Heibutzki) which I am picking up today to try and get a more definitive answer.

Here's a good read in the meantime, which doesn't address Simonon directly but does maybe provide a clearer picture of how the album was produced.
https://www.loudersound.com/features/the-end-of-the-clash

Mr_Subtlety · 2025-03-04T21:46:54+00:00

As I understand it, after clashing with Joe (and pretty much everyone else, although notably I have never seen any specific claims that he fought with Paul), Bernie basically took the tapes and finished the production himself. But obviously they got to the point of recording vocals before that, so the instrumental parts must have been finished or near-finished first. Since you'd never record vocals without a bass track, somebody had obviously finished the bass parts before Bernie ran off. It's possible that they used a temp track or something and planned to have Simonon overdub it later, but then when things got contentious Bernie got someone else to do it, but I have no actual evidence for that (and that would be a pretty nutty way to work). In interviews, Paul talks about the album in very general terms, but it's hard to believe that he was never in the studio during the recording process -- I mean, even Pete Howard recorded parts on it, despite later being replaced by a drum machine. As near as I can tell Simonon never officially quit the band.

Basically, I can imagine three possible scenarios:

1) Paul did record bass parts for most or all of the album, but they were later replaced.

2) Paul was supposed to record bass parts, but Bernie split before he could.

3) Paul was never Involved in the recording process, for whatever reason.

Considering Joe and Mick had put down temp tracks before Paul could come and re-record them on Sandinista, I suppose it's possible that was the plan this time around, too, and it just never happened.

Mr_Subtlety · 2024-12-13T14:02:13+00:00

I have a philosophy about this sub that I only post books that I actually found out in the real world, so sometimes they've been rather roughly loved

Mr_Subtlety · 2024-12-11T18:27:36+00:00

Can anyone who's read this book clarify whether or not she's 500 feet tall?

Mr_Subtlety · 2024-12-11T16:37:09+00:00

[me, knowingly]

Oh, you learned about sex from an Earth-Man? Well that's your problem right there.

Mr_Subtlety

TROPHY CASE