My UU ordained friend is a nonbinary activist who was in Minneapolis during the ICE shit.

The first time I went to a UU service, I was invited to a rationalist group that meets there.

It’s all of the good things about religion (ie - community. People who will meal train for you when you are in trouble, people who will teach your kids good shit) without much of the baggage.

I’m personally going to start attending either a UU or a really loosely Methodist group just for the social aspect. I think one of the failures of atheism is the lack of acknowledgment of the benefits of community and ritual. There’s not enough “third places” in the world, and churches can fill that roll quite well. Perhaps this is just my own recent near death experience speaking, but it’s good to have a community that cares about you.

Oh that’s delightful.

I watched some videos on medieval math education recently, and I’ve been wanting to create a unit or something themed around what you’d learn as a medieval student.

I emphasize history a lot more than any math teacher I’ve known, but I think it can be effective. The Pythagorean theorem is absolutely critical to memorize and understand, and it can be very fun to go into all the Pythagoras cult stuff.

I want to learn more about cars, specifically to try to reach this type of kid.

I had one car obsessed kid that I sorta won over with “let’s try to model car parts with geometric solids and think about volume as it pertains to things like gas tanks,” but I don’t know enough about cars to really make the kinds of deep connections I know could be there.

I have a good rapport with anime and gamer teens usually. Minecraft is a godsend, because almost everyone has played it and you can tie so much math and science shit into it. I’ve learned more from this YouTube channel than I did from my fossil fuel funded undergrad geology classes.

Oh there’s more:

I guess the Simpsons is public domain.

Ya know, I’d rather just have plain text website designed for 4 gb or less. I’ve never been in the financial position to have 16 gbs, and it’s far worse now. I just want to not be denied access to text because all websites want to secretly run so much JavaScript and all the other shit. Eventually I’ll give up on the web and just be happy on gopher and Gemini.

Most middle and high schoolers use chromebooks nowadays.

This administration has been actively hostile to space exploration. The only support is for moon to mars, because that fulfills billionaire sexual fantasies of ruling over Martian empires.

Projects like asteroid and Kuiper Belt exploration have been absolutely slaughtered. NASA has been cutting education and basically everything not directly connected to long term plans for Martian colonization. It’s also been cut up for parts and sold off to the highest bidder.

As someone who had some NASA associations, watching everyone bend the knee has been sickening.

Taylor Swift in particular has had thousands of pornographic pictures generated of her, which is fucked up.

Southern states breed a type of politician that is what Donald Trump is on a pettier and smaller scale - you could say they were the prototype. Try Ma Ferguson and Alfalfa Bill Murray for stupid fucks that made their way to Governor (Ma Ferguson is probably(?) the originator of “if English was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for me; Alfalfa Bill Murray almost started a Texas/Oklahoma war).

Sorta like how MTG, and Michelle Bachman before her started. National attention for saying stupid shit = avalanche of votes on name recognition in your stupid home state.

Sean Hannity just renounced his Catholicism because of that little Trump/Pope spat.

Their “Christianity” is Messianic Trumpism.

My apartment has two rooms. One is a storage room, the other is the living room/bedroom. TV (a computer monitor hooked up to a PlayStation 4 for YouTube) is right in front of the pile of blankets and pillows where I sleep, and is on 24/7.

Which revisionists?

Lost causers and other racists who want to pretend that the US’s mass enslavement, torture, rape and murder of Africans wasn’t unique.

Why is “muslim slavery” different to “slavery”?

There is not one thing that you can generically refer to as “Muslim slavery.” You can be specific - you can talk about Ottoman slavery, or slavery under the Abassids or something, but saying “Muslim slavery” is a dead give away that you’ve done absolutely zero thinking or research. It’s just a generic “other people had slaves too!” non sequitor.

Why are you trying to make arguments about a topic you clearly have no understanding of? Would you try to teach a calculus class if you had never taken an integral?

Good job revealing that you know absolutely nothing about US history.

My understanding segregation in the US was actually about white people keeping their kids away from integrated schools (which is a nuance, it wasn’t black school vs white school - and a lot of it was in the south). Slavery is NOT a colour based system.

Absolutely, categorically, objectively wrong.

I just saw an ad on Facebook recruiting volunteers to go through old housing contracts to find where they still explicitly prohibit Black folks from living in certain neighborhoods. It was based on Black versus White. In the schools which continue to be de facto segregated based on race to this fucking day, it is based on race.

Get your foot out of your mouth and pick up a basic history textbook.

You get that there is a pattern of shitty historical revisionists that bring up “Muslim slavery” to minimize US slavery? Which you just did?

Is “Islam” a universal world view? If you want to talk about Islam and slavery, at bare fucking minimum you need to talk about a specific area, time period and its strain of Islam. I have no idea what your vague illusion to “Europe” was even supposed to mean in the context of slavery.

I think you just need to recognize that you know next to nothing about this topic, and when one knows nothing, they need to shut the fuck up.

Slavery in the US WAS BASED ON THE COLOR OF PEOPLE’S SKIN. As was SEGREGATION.

Are you not capable of reading or do you just lack any knowledge of the basic history you are trying to argue about?

All slavery is bad

You are aware of the fact that there are different forms of slavery?

The chattel slavery of the antebellum US is uniquely bad in scale and brutality of oppression. This is clear to anyone who has spent more than five minutes studying the topic.

Living in the US means regularly encountering light skinned black people. The reason that most light skinned black people in the US have light skin is because of rape. Systemic rape. After the import ban of the early 1800’s, the U.S. bred its own slaves.

This arbitrary timeline doesn’t help

The point, which should be abundantly obvious, is how recent race based chattel slavery being ended is, and how it was present throughout the history of the US.

The fact is that the US was built on race based chattel slavery. The US is fundamentally structured on racial hierarchy, with Black individuals existing under White ones. This has been legally codified for the bulk of the US’s lifespan, and is a foundational part of the way the US is structured.

This could be similarly said about Brazil, which was also organized around race based chattel slavery, with Europeans importing slaves from Africa there as well.

“Europe” or “Islam” are irrelevant and too broad to be useful terms for historical analysis or at all relevant here.

There’s also an obsession with the Battle of Tours. “Catholic” to them is more the idea of white heritage.

There’s an evolving strain of US Catholicism, exemplified by weirdos like JD Vance, who like the aesthetic of Catholicism (especially the Deus Vult thing) without really caring about any of the actual Catholic beliefs. It’s more like they have a childish misunderstanding of Catholicism as just being a more serious Christian. Which is not uncommon a misunderstanding in the south/Midwest, oddly enough - the desire for fundies to create a coalition to fight abortion in the 70’s/80’s really ended a lot of the more typical anti-Catholicism of the south.

Similar to the “American Orthodox,” which is the same idea with more of a Russian flavor.