It’s hard to escape the conclusion that the distortion of the history of South Africa is in the service of distorting current apartheid in Israel and Palestine. For years the outrage from supporters of Israel was, “how dare you compare us to apartheid South Africa”. Is this now morphing into, “yeah well what was so bad about apartheid South Africa anyway! It was the end of apartheid that was the problem!” A rather unexpected turn (to me at least) if so. And all because South Africa had the temerity to call out genocide when they saw it. The trouble for Israel is that South Africa is no longer the only country calling out the obvious as conditions and starvation in Gaza get worse and worse.
slimboyfat
JoinedPosts by slimboyfat
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75
Why do they want to kill all the White People?
by liam inthe hatred against whites is escalating to an unprecedented degree.
in south africa, they are calling for complete genocide of white people.
for some reason they are targeting all the white farmers.. i’m so glad trump noticed.
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WT Library on iphone
by BoogerMan injust came into 21st century and got myself a new fangled mobile 'phone.. question: is it safe to download the wt library from the google playstore - without the borg tracking/tracing my data?.
thanks..
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slimboyfat
Probably safe but who knows.
I remember back around 2010 I used to laugh at people who put duct tape over the camera on their laptops. I thought that was paranoid nonsense. Now after Snowden and all the rest, I’m convinced various governments and companies are able and do routinely track all our devices, including recording audio and video from our devices if they wish.
Does WT have the ability to track using cookies? Perhaps. Would they be bothered to do so? Probably not. If they did would they find anything interesting? Depends what you consider interesting. I use their website and app and I’m not worried if they track me. I can’t imagine what they’d use against me or how, but perhaps I lack imagination. In the current political climate I’m frankly more concerned that the authorities will take exception to my views on Ukraine or Palestine than I’m worried about Watchtower reacting to my views on say the blood ban or shunning. -
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You Could Be Stuck in a University When Your Parent Dies. Convention Day 2 Video
by liam inthe governing body is going all out at this years convention.
they are still discouraging university education.
i guess the end must be real close .
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slimboyfat
In historic JW perspective I find it a bit ironic because Fred Franz left his academic studies, not to help with a family crisis, but to devote himself to Watchtower full time. Having done so, when his father died some years later Franz didn’t even want to leave his work at Watchtower headquarters to attend the funeral. He only went reluctantly, so the story goes, when ordered to do so by Rutherford. So in Franz’s case it was his devotion to Watchtower service that held him back from attending to his family, not university education.
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You Could Be Stuck in a University When Your Parent Dies. Convention Day 2 Video
by liam inthe governing body is going all out at this years convention.
they are still discouraging university education.
i guess the end must be real close .
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slimboyfat
The argument used to be that extending education is pointless because the end is so near. If the new argument is that your family might need you while you’re away getting an education, that’s a pivot that downgrades end-time expectations as the motivating factor.
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slimboyfat
Since you don’t seem to know that a woman’s married name has nothing to do with her ancestry, or that the number of siblings a person has has no bearing on the number cousins their grandchildren will have (do you even read the ChatGPT guff before posting it?) forgive me if I don’t follow your latest nicely formatted, and plausible sounding, logical goop that your latest AI prompts have thrown up in seconds.
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slimboyfat
Yeah all that might be what happened at a stretch, it’s not impossible. Or she could simply be the cousin of the pope, which is a perfectly ordinary and everyday thing to happen in this world. Given the number of JWs (around 1 in 400 in Christian countries) it’s reasonably likely that one or other pope has had a JW relative. Why not this one? Why are you so determined that it could not possibly be true? It’s not like she was claiming something incredible or supernatural, like her cat turned into a dog, or her wine turned into blood.
As far as I can remember Austrians were expecting that Cardinal Schönborn might become pope and were a bit disappointed he was apparently disqualified because of scandals. I only heard about Ratzinger, after he was elected, from commentators who said it was a shock that such a traditionalist was elected. Some treated it as the worst possible outcome given his history. I remember journalist Christina Odone was visibly shaken at the result and they had good fun with Ratzinger (“eyes of a killer”) on the comedy programme Have I Got News For You.
All of which is completely beside the point, it’s really getting into the weeds and has next to nothing to do with the veracity of the story. I suspect you argue just for the sake of it and AI of course has limitless energy and resources to spew out plausible sounding but patently ridiculous and tangential arguments.
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slimboyfat
Yeah all that might be what happened at a stretch, it’s not impossible. Or she could simply be the cousin of the pope, which is a perfectly ordinary and everyday thing to happen in this world. Given the number of JWs (around 1 in 400 in Christian countries) it’s reasonably likely that one or other pope has had a JW relative. Why not this one? Why are you so determined that it could not possibly be true? It’s not like she was claiming something incredible or supernatural, like her wine turned to blood or something like that.
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slimboyfat
Anony Mous you give a reasonable scenario of a family legend that got out of hand and perhaps, by the time the papers got involved, it was too late to back down. It would require however that old JW woman lied specifically about the phone call and ran the risk of being exposed as a liar. That is not impossible but I still think on a balance of probabilities it’s more likely she was telling the truth, because the details of the pope having a cousin who became a JW, him contacting her, and the general comments he made seem ordinary and plausible enough. JWs are capable of not telling the truth like anyone else of course, so we can’t be certain.
One weakness in the legend scenario is the following:
a family legend they were related to a (in)famous cardinal who later became pope.
The story broke immediately after Ratzinger became pope, so there would not have been time for a family legend around him becoming pope in particular; a prominent cardinal perhaps. Although how many cardinals can your average JW name? Even at a time when cardinals have been in the news for weeks, I can only name a handful myself. Ratzinger was a very prominent and important cardinal before he became pope, but I still don’t think I’d heard of him before the conclave when John Paul II died. If a legend grew up about her being related to Ratzinger before he became pope isn’t it more likely that the reason it grew up was because it was based in fact? Otherwise why choose this cardinal in particular to build a legend around?
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slimboyfat
For crying out loud give it a rest.
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slimboyfat
I totally agree with the bot that newspapers get things wrong all the time. They habitually get names, dates, locations, sequences of events, and other important details wildly wrong. I’ve seen newspapers and broadcast media do this many times and assume it’s ubiquitous. What newspapers don’t usually do, and would be somewhat harder to mess up is, say, present a photo of a JW claiming to be the pope’s cousin complete with her JW convention badge on, when instead she’s actually a Mormon who fell down a hole in the street and is suing for lifelong impairment, for example. I mean I wouldn’t totally put it past some newspapers to be as wrong as that, but they are usually wrong on the details rather than the entire framing.