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Studying rhetoric. It’s hella fun sometimes and hella depressing others times.
The paradigm shift that studying rhetoric has caused for me will probably influence me for the rest of my life. I’m now agnostic about the truth and barely interpret rhetoric in terms of truth/lies. Like I feel this paragraph from Post-Truth Rhetoric and Composition:
Everything about political rhetoric makes more sense to me when I think in terms of post-truth.
But also, rhetorical figures are cool af. The Elements of Eloquence: Secrets of the Perfect Turn of Phrase is one of the most interesting books I’ve ever read about how to turn a phrase. Plus, being able to name why a sentence like “The liberal arts are the arts of liberty necessary to the exercise of citizenship in a free republic” has a particular rhetorical effect is fascinating. And that sentence is a kind of chiasmus, my favorite rhetorical figure.
I’m not sure if this is good news or bad but it’s the same damn problem since 380BCE
This was interesting, thanks for sharing.
More power to you. I feel like I understand this well enough just from following politics over the last 8 years, and I kinda hate how I have to break my brain to understand what politicians are actually saying. I do it as a necessity to remain an engaged citizen, not for fun 😂
The Elements of Eloquence is a fantastic read.
Programming was my hobby, now it’s my job so instead of having a hobby I just work too much
Yeah it was a fun hobby too when I was in school. But when I started working as a programmer, I don’t want anything to do with it after work hours, or else I get terrible burnout. I’ve tried a couple of hobbies but now I just do video games and learning guitar.
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I enjoy programming. However this opinion varies wildly if my code works or not.
It brang me to develop photon!
I enjoy your work too. Thanks!
I like to just browse Wikipedia. It’s an endless wealth of knowledge that never ceases to impress me. It’s like the modern library of Alexandria.
I also make cocktails for fun, target shoot, fish, ride trails (not trials), make pens, collect knives, play skyrim, and i cook too.
I bounce between what i focus on often.
you make pens? Like ink pens?
Yeah like ballpoint pens
That’s really cool! Do you have to buy specific materials, or do you buy other pens and take them apart to make new ones?
Yeah i buy internal kits. It has the transmission, tube, pen cartridge, and some other pieces. I usually pour my own acrilic blanks, and cut my own wood blanks.
Mostly i just turn down wood or acrylics into the exterior handle piece of the pen. Its pretty cathartic because you end up with a product that reflects your effort and each one will be completely unique.
what’s the transmission on a pen?
Its the piece that clicks and moves the ballpoint in or out of the housing. On some pens it clicks and on others it twists. Its just the moving part.
oh! I can’t tell you enough how cool I think this is. I have always loved pens though and have a hard time not spending too much when I go to art stores cause I want to buy all the pens/markers.
Maybe the clicky bit?
I have two main categories, pleasant distractions, and screaming at the gods.
Pleasant distractions are things I enjoy in my free time like video games, reading, juggling, lock picking.
Screaming at the gods are things I do because I need something so physical and dangerous that it requires 100% of my focus. Skateboarding, snowboarding, long distance motorcycle trips. These are things I do to get work and other stresses out of my head for a time, as I can’t afford to have my attention split.
I like those two categories and how you take up both, a lot
Over the pandemic I picked up a hobby of digging really deep into the history of the Bible.
It’s so much more interesting than I would have ever thought, and so opposite what everyone (on both sides of the topic) tends to think.
An early history of powerful women peeking through a patriarchal rewrite.
A likely foreign introduction of an Exodus tale from the sea peoples.
A famine story turned into a flood from Babylonian influence.
A generic ‘adversary’ term (‘Satan’) during conversion from a polytheistic story to monotheism leading to the most extensive fanfiction in history.
A version of Jesus referring to contemporary ideas around evolution and atomism in Leucretius being declared false heresy by the group that goes on to be canonized.
Yet again empowered women having their history rewritten by patriarchal opposition.
For someone who has always enjoyed solving little puzzles, it’s been a gift that keeps on giving.
I’ve watched a couple videos from Esoterica. His videos are wild. Who could have expected that the biblical God came from a storm-warrior god?
Sort of. One of the things I see as a common mistake in analyzing the Bible is the attempt to harmonize the different books of the Bible into a single picture of the origin and nature of a figure in it.
So yes, the storm god that shows up in Job is almost certainly coming from the ANE storm god stories which had that god defending a sea monster.
But that isn’t necessarily where ‘Yahweh’ was originating, as much as perhaps a later syncretism with local mythos.
And ultimately, I’d argue for a case that the significance of Yahweh was mostly as consort, potentially mirroring the Shasu (the only bronze age association with Yahweh) having had a real world political marriage to a high priestess of the Queen of Heaven, which was typically Yahweh’s wife in early archeology and was elsewhere in the ANE married to the storm god who slayed the sea beast.
That marriage is later overwritten and regarded as a corruption of an earlier monotheistic tradition, but such monotheism is anachronistic for that earlier period when it is archeologically evidenced as widely polytheistic.
So while I do think it’s helpful with videos like that broadening people’s horizons from what they might hear by modern believers in the texts, the actual picture is potentially far more complicated than a direct transmission of ANE parallels.
Even a story like Noah’s Ark, which fits with a storm god, appears to be a later incorporation of Babylonian flood mythos on top of an earlier Noah story as the hero of a famine story, not a flood story (Idan Dershowitz has a compelling paper on this).
I would like to do this. I checked out audio recordings from a priest about apocalypse stories as a genre and the use of numbers in the Bible, and I’ve looked at Bible as Literature classes but never signed up. Did you follow a course or study guide?
This is super interesting but I would like to know where you are learning all this from?
Years of participation in /r/AcademicBiblical leads to a lot of knowledge. If you have a specific item you want more on, I can point you to more information.
Yeah, I grew up as a Jehovah’s Witness. Do you have info on where they got their lore?
it’s a shame I left reddit when there’s stuff like that on there.
Unfortunately not really. My focus was on 1450 BCE to around 450 CE, so while I can talk a lot about dead sects, for the nuances of modern ones I’m not much more informed than the average person.
That makes sense. They only started around 1944 I believe and had several different names before they stuck with Jehovah Witnesses.
A lot of their teachings come from Christian beliefs though and a lot of it is similar. They believe Jesus died for our sins and what not.
Can I ask how anyone has info from as far back as 1450 BCE? Like is it guesses based on ancient artifacts?
Forgive me if these kinds of questions are already answered on reddit.
It depends on the culture. Ancient Egypt had centuries of records by 1450 BCE which have survived until today. Other cultures writing on parchment that didn’t survive we know almost nothing about first hand.
So it’s a mixture of secondhand reports from people alive during the period those records may have existed, but who didn’t have good methodology for reporting history (so you need to take with a giant grain of salt) or primary records which survived, to extrapolating from archeology records.
For example, a few years ago in Tel Rehov an apiary was found active from the 10th-8th centuries BCE.
Until that find, scholars assumed “land of milk and honey” wasn’t referring to actual bee honey.
In that apiary was an altar to an unknown goddess where honey was burnt, and that altar had four ‘horns’ on the corners.
The style of a four horned altar is instructed to the Israelites in the Bible, but this altar was one of the earliest archeologically evidenced, Leviticus make explicit mention of banning burning honey as a sacrifice, and the apiary was destroyed and not rebuilt but the surrounding structures were not at that time, so it looks like it was explicitly targeted. Also, the bees themselves were shown through DNA analysis to have been imported from Anatolia.
So even without any primary written records, we can see that certain aspects of this imported tradition may have been syncretized into the pre-8th century Israelites, but that then there was a reform that resulted in opposition to it and its destruction.
Given the time period it was destroyed was around when Asa allegedly deposed his grandmother the Queen Mother and hired mercenaries to conquer the northern kingdoms reforming against goddess worship, we might even fathom a loose guess as to what events triggered that shift.
It’s certainly much easier when there’s detailed records like in Egypt though, where you even have papyrus records of legal proceedings, etc.
When I was growing up, that was referred to as the “lost scrolls” which is where Jehovah Witnesses claim to get a lot of their info from. I don’t know if they do anymore as they have changed a lot of their teachings but they also use to mention that, because stuff that was written down long ago and translated over and over, they tried their best to get the most accurate translations for their bible - but the also cut a lot of stuff out. They claim other religions added versus to scriptures that were unnecessary.
I tried to do some digging once on the ones they removed and they seemed to be mostly related to angel sightings or angels talking to humans and apparently that didn’t happen as often other religions might say it did? But all I did was try to compare King James version of the bible to their JW bible.
It’s super interesting that for a long time we all just thought a phrase wasn’t meant to be literal like that but it really was about honey. That makes me wonder how much other stuff there is in religion where people thought there was some grand explanation when really, its probably just playing telephone with translations over thousands of years and not understanding things until actually digging into it more.
Are there any records of people talking to God? I feel like Egypt would be the place to look too as most of the bible I remember takes place in Egypt.
There are many records of people claiming to talk to gods.
My favorite at the moment is in the boundary stelae of Amarna.
The young Pharoh explicitly claims that it wasn’t his wife or anyone else who told him to put the city there, but the god Aten directly that told him.
For context, elsewhere in that inscription it describes his wife Nefertiti as getting everything she asked for, she was the only woman in all of Egypt’s history to be depicted in the “smiting pose” and prior to that inscription she and her daughter were recorded in inscriptions communing with the Aten without the Pharoh.
So while it’s claimed that he was talking directly to a god, my money would be on it having been his wife’s idea after all and that he was adding a denial to the inscription to put to rest rumors of that being the case.
In general, context can add a lot to claims of divine communication. For example, Moses was said to talk face to face with God in the tabernacle and when he would do so everyone knew because a cloud would appear at the door.
But that process of anointing oneself and then going into a tent sounds a lot like the Scythian ritual in Herodotus where they anointed themselves and went into a tent where they burned cannabis. And indeed, just a few years ago there was a discovery of burning cannabis in the holy of holies of an 8th century BCE Judahite temple in Tel Arad.
So perhaps that ‘cloud’ appearing when communicating with the divine shortly after first finding the ability to do so through a burning bush has more to it than face value.
And yeah, most traditions claim some sort of secret access to knowledge. But the times where those documents turn up they tend to be disappointingly unbelievable, where they may have ended up ‘secret’ because to those not deeply invested in the tradition their revelation would have pushed people away (like the Xenu stuff in Scientology).
It’s one of the things I like about the “put the lamp in the window and not under the bed” or “shout from the rooftops” in early Christianity. That was during a period when mystery traditions and secret teachings were very popular, and it was refreshing to see someone saying to instead put it all out there. Unfortunately secrecy creeps back into Christian traditions not long after both canonically and extra-canonically.
I had never heard about this before!
But I had heard about the tent where they were burning cannabis and yeah, that makes a lot more of the bible stories make sense. I’ve also heard the burning bush itself was also cannabis.
This has got to be one of the coolest interactions I’ve had on here, btw.
I am not in the tech field but I love coding and learning new languages. I have for the last 25 years. When my actual (blue collar) profession starts feeling drab or boring my mind naturally starts drifting to find some problem to solve or some way of automating things just to keep me happy and engaged.
Batch scripts on MS/DOS, my first (floppy disk installed) Slackware box. REXX in OS/2. I worked through the animal books and played with Java, Perl, C - actually building tools that work and accomplish things.
Diving in to a new language or project is like discovering a new author you didn’t know about and the hours of joy it will bring me are fantastic and fulfilling. I guess you could say my hobby is learning.
I wrote a great iOS app to help me with things in my job and I use it all the time which saves me literally hours, making my work happier and more profitable. Best hobby ever and totally cheap too!
I sew. Specifically, I love sewing stuffed animals.
As a kid, I always wanted those giant stuffed animals, but it just wasn’t meant to be. Now I can make pretty much whatever I want!
I love the colors, the feel of the fabrics… but my favorite part is seeing my 2D drawings get turning into a tangible 3D object! Plus, it makes kids go “WHOOOOAAA” or smile or laugh when they see what I make. That really can’t be beat!
Gardening. And … yes!
I get up in the morning and the first thing on my mind is to go out and tend to the various veggies. The beans are flowering and the tomatoes are ripening and the herbs keep on herbing. Gonna pull out more potatoes in a week or so. Some rodent got to some of the lettuce recently, but not all of it. The fruit trees are having some trouble because they didn’t get enough nutrients for a while, but they’re getting better now and having new growth.
There’s always stuff to do. The kitchen compost turns into healthy soil for the plants. A neighbor shares fruits they’ve been growing; I hope to give them a big pile of tomatoes in return in a few weeks. It’s all good.
Sorry about your lettuce. Do you have a problem with rabbits and tomatoes? Every time I’ve tried to grow tomatoes they end up with one bite out of each one on the day they ripen.
I haven’t seen any rabbits near here. We’ve got squirrels and occasional rats. Someone in the neighborhood feeds cooked peanuts (in the shell) to the squirrels, and they bury them in the garden where they become worm food.
I started selfhosting just before the pandemic. I don’t know that I’d say it’s fun so much as sometimes satisfying.
Single player RPGs, reading are my alone hobbies.
Cooking is by myself, but I care that my wife likes it.
Board games and tabletop RPGs are what I enjoy with multiple people.
And finally, I used to like dancing ( ball room & latin american), but haven’t in over a decade, now the wife and I will start a course in two weeks :)
Building custom ROMs, it’s satisfying AF.
What hardware do you have for this endeavor?
240GB SSD 1TB HDD, 16GB RAM, 40GB ZRAM and a Ryzen 7 2700 processor.
I build loudspeakers, both home and car. But, mostly car subwoofers, amplifiers, head units etc. But also home speakers for home theaters.
I absolutely love it. Music is a big passion of mine (despite never learning to play an instrument). I love it because every project has so many challenges. I love electrical work and designing a system from scratch and then getting to see it actually work iis awesome. It’s like little engineering challenges all throughout. Very engaging for me.
There’s also a lot of wood working involved. Making a functional piece of furniture and getting to expirement with different techniques is a lot of fun.
My dad used to do this as a side hustle. It’s how I learned to solder.
This is neat af
Retro computing. Programming things like a Commodore 64 in Assembly on the machine. It’s a wonderful experience and pretty removed from modern programming.
I’ve gotten into gaslands, which is a tabletop game you play with modified hot wheels cars.
I like taking things apart, putting them back together, and generally working with my hands so taking apart a bunch of little cars and gluing spikey bits and rocket launchers and stuff to them is up my alley.
And because it’s a post apocalyptic setting, it doesn’t really matter how good you are at painting and such, dirty, dinged up, messy, etc. is a totally valid aesthetic. That’s kind of what you’d expect from some wastelanders slapping weapons onto whatever car they can get their hands on.