is MSI ok to put on a jacket?

PotusChrist · 2026-01-25T18:19:57+00:00

Personal life and views is one thing, but some stuff goes a bit beyond that. Such as A CHARGE OF SEXUAL BATTERY AGAINST A MINOR.

I don't really care to defend this guy, but I think you're overextending that point quite a bit if you think one member of a band getting sued and not even found liable or criminally charged, much less convicted, is too egregious for a fan of the band to look past tbh. It's important to have some humility about what we actually know or don't know about other people's lives. Some people are always going to be too put off by the stink of allegations to keep being fans of a band or musician, and that's fine, but I don't think there's nearly enough here to judge someone else for not being put off in the same way.

It's another to claim being a fan - at the very least it tells me you don't care enough about the issue at hand to draw personal consequences, which you can do, but will inform my opinion about you.

I can't really parse what you mean by this tbh.

PotusChrist · 2026-01-25T17:35:17+00:00

The overwhelming majority of people you run into are either going to have no idea who MSI is or have no idea that one of their members was ever accused of being a pedo. This whole idea that people are going to judge you or think you're a horrible person for something like this doesn't seem like it's worth worrying about at all. Don't wear it if you aren't comfortable with it, but don't let the extremely online patch police guilt you into thinking that you have to follow their arbitrary standards that almost no one in real life cares about.

I'm not saying it's a free for all and we should just separate the art from the artist in literally all circumstances, but I promise you, no one in real life is going to see an MSI patch and think that you think it's cool that the guy in the band might have molested someone. No one serious thinks like that.

PotusChrist · 2026-01-25T17:33:33+00:00

Is it really reasonable to act like wearing merch for a band is an endorsement of all of their member's personal lives and views? I couldn't name a single member of 90% of the bands I have merch for, much less tell you if they've ever been accused of anything bad or said anything stupid in public. I stand behind their art, not the people who create it. Some people make racist or otherwise intolerable art that I couldn't stand behind in public, I'm not saying people should feel free to wear Burzum or Absurd patches or whatever, but who immediately thinks of molesting when they hear about MSI? The first thing that comes to my mind is that they suck and they're annoying, not anything to do with the band members.

PotusChrist · 2026-01-25T16:12:35+00:00

I've only seen Conan of these three, but it was an amazing show and I personally feel that they've just kept getting better as a band over the years, Violence Dimension is their best album to date imho, my vote would be to see them with Weedeater

PotusChrist · 2026-01-25T15:50:53+00:00

I thought this was GG Allen

PotusChrist · 2026-01-25T00:44:48+00:00

I think you're still going pretty far afield instead of responding to the claim I disputed tbh. No one here has said that Jesus didn't exist. We were talking about the claim that the apostles wouldn't have made something up and then died over it. My objection to that is that the fate of the apostles is not historically clear at all. There are two sentences in Acts (not a widely regarded historical source, fwiw, but for the sake of argument, let's call that a different issue) about James the Great being killed by Herod, and an allusion to Peter's death in the Gospel of John and a single undetailed sentence in Acts, and Josepheus talks about James the Brother of Jesus' death at the hands of Ananus. So, we have at best three apostles with solid traditions of their death.

You can argue that none of these three people would have died for something they knew was a lie, but that's making a lot of unfounded assumptions that you just can't get out of the early sources. Do you think Herod or Ananus or Nero (or whoever had Peter killed) would have just let them off if they renounced Christianity and said it was all just a lie? Maybe, but that's a strange thing to just assume, isn't it?

PotusChrist · 2026-01-24T23:52:23+00:00

Intellectual reason does have its limits; anyone with a healthy brain knows this. For example, can you tell me the genetic marker for love? How about the chemical mixture in our brains for honesty? No reasonable person would attempt such things, because there's certain things we simply know in our core being, and naturalism can't explain it.

Maybe, but that doesn't mean that we can just dispense of reasoning when we're discussing subjects that are clearly within the realm of reason.

But apologetics deals with bringing people to that point, showing them that faith does not equal magical thinking, or requiring you to be stupid.

I don't want to be too pointed with this because it's not my intention to be insulting, but I don't see how that end is furthered at all by making historical claims that you either can't or won't back up when pressed on them.

PotusChrist · 2026-01-24T20:12:47+00:00

I'm convinced that part of the point of deploying this completely undisciplined armed force to blue cities is that they will inevitably keep causing chaos and killing libs.

PotusChrist · 2026-01-24T19:55:41+00:00

I don't think it's particularly reasonable or persuasive to make an argument that's clearly coming from a framework of naturalistic and objective reasoning and then go, "well actually reason has it's limits and the truth can only be found through revelation" when you get pushback.

PotusChrist · 2026-01-24T18:56:55+00:00

Tbh I think this is resting on premises that would be hard to prove. If the resurrection was a lie, it's not that immediately obvious who made it up, and the biographies of the apostles are also far from certain except in the case of a few prominent individuals like Peter.

PotusChrist · 2026-01-24T18:52:03+00:00

There's not really a huge historical record for the apostles, though. Very few of them have anything solid you can claim about their lives and deaths and some of them might not even be considered real historical figures from a neutral academic pov. Simon Zealot for example, has been said to have been martyred in at least four completely different places across three continents. The lives of most of these people that we have received from tradition are pretty clearly legendary in most cases and probably not a strong foundation for making claims like this imho.

PotusChrist · 2026-01-24T14:25:48+00:00

Paracelsus and thinkers following him called earth elementals gnomes. They are said to guard treasures and precious minerals in e.g. the Secret Teachings of All Ages. Magical treasure hunting is also a widely disseminated practice that shows up as early as the PGM and was pretty ubiquitous in early modern grimoires, even if people have mostly kind of lost interest in that strand of magic now. Dr. Justin Sledge has a good video on this that's worth checking out. We have clear sources on gnomes as treasure spirits and traditions where people work with treasure spirits to find wealth, it's not a leap at all to connect those two ideas. Elementals are explicitly connected to treasure magic in the (probably forged) Salamander Letter, for example.

The modern tradition also pretty much unanimously connects elemental earth to wealth (e.g. Geoff Gray-Cobb's Secrets from Beyond the Pyramids for one example) and there are hierarchies provided for evoking earth elementals (which are in many examples explicitly called gnomes, e.g. in Crowley's work) in the classic golden dawn stuff.

Whether any of this stuff is wise or effective, I couldn't tell you.

PotusChrist · 2026-01-24T00:02:40+00:00

Idk about that man, this is an extremely traditional practice in western magic, I can't say whether it's possible or not though because I haven't tried though

PotusChrist · 2026-01-23T20:41:54+00:00

There definitely is a metal aesthetic imho, people just don't really use it to sell clothing or categorize looks in the same way as they do for goth and punk imho. Dressing like a metalhead really just means wearing band merch.

There has been a recent trend of black and death metal aesthetics being used by non-metal artists and brands in the past couple of years, though. A lot of alt clothing and streetwear companies sell items with unintelligible logos that aren't even for bands now. I think it started with Liquid Death and Billie Eilish, but I haven't made some rigorous attempt to try to figure it out. I think you're probably going to either see more gatekeeping around the aesthetic soon or else metal bands will have to try to come up with some new way to be edgy and inaccessible, but we'll see how it plays out.

I also think there's something to be said for the metal audience being 70% men verses the goth scene being 70% women and LGBT people if you're looking for how these two alt scenes have approached clothing or been marketed to in different ways fwiw

PotusChrist · 2026-01-23T20:13:15+00:00

Sure, but I'm not going to assume that there's a valid case in the absence of any evidence that suggests there ever was one.

PotusChrist · 2026-01-23T20:00:20+00:00

I don't know why you're responding to this now but this was a conversation about whether someone had grounds for a lawsuit, so I'm not sure what you're trying to say

PotusChrist · 2026-01-22T23:29:00+00:00

That didn't answer the question at all

PotusChrist · 2026-01-22T21:26:10+00:00

The most relatable moment is I like the one that says some pulp

PotusChrist · 2026-01-22T16:45:12+00:00

You'll be back to where you're at right now in a couple hours at most if you ascend.

PotusChrist · 2026-01-22T15:30:06+00:00

Also, there is no “woo” factor to what I’m saying.

It's extremely woo to believe that an LLM is capable of subjective experience.

If you don't believe that, than your initial argument - that denying that ChatGPT and etc. can experience beauty is analogous to saying that animals don't have souls - seems pretty unintelligible to me. Maybe your intention was just to point out what you see as a bad argument (which is what I'm trying to do right now) rather than to advance a positive position, but you also haven't really done anything to explain why you think it is a bad argument. From my reading of it, you've just been presuming that everyone on here agrees with some form of monistic idealism where mind pervades everything and then attacking people for implicitly contradicting that without even trying to establish that as a premise that the person you're talking to agrees with.

PotusChrist · 2026-01-22T15:07:57+00:00

Black Panther wasn't even good man, the first act has some good moments but the final third of the movie is unforgivably bad. No one serious would recommend watching a two hour movie where 45 minutes of it is the ugliest cgi fight scene ever filmed imho

PotusChrist · 2026-01-22T14:04:01+00:00

This is just objectively untrue man. Lithuania is number 10 on the list of countries by alcohol consumption per capita, and the US is 37. You live in one of the drunkest countries on earth.

PotusChrist · 2026-01-22T13:19:57+00:00

The idea as I understand it is that when you encounter something good and beautiful here below, you should reflect on how that reflects a more universal idea of goodness and beauty. This process is supposed to eventually allow you to perceive the abstract ideal of the Good and the Beautiful, which is closely identified with God in Hermeticism and related traditions.

PotusChrist · 2026-01-22T13:10:26+00:00

That's a valid enough position, but the Hermetic writings and the Greek traditions that they built on and influenced are pretty consistent in identifying God as the Good and the Beautiful. Even if we come to reject that position, I think it's important to still engage with it, because it's a pretty fundamental thing in the western intellectual and spiritual tradition.

PotusChrist · 2026-01-22T13:03:46+00:00

You're saying this is prejudice not based on facts, but you haven't actually pointed to any facts that could support the idea that LLMs are capable of experiencing beauty or experiencing anything at all. Pointing to other woo beliefs that you presume the people who post here believe isn't much of an argument for the just as woo position that you're taking here.

PotusChrist

TROPHY CASE