BeautifulMind ♾️

"We’re tracking you for your privacy 🙄

Isn’t that in the Torah?

Yes, it’s in Exodus. Exodus is part of the Torah, as well as the Old Testament, along with Leviticus. The Torah is the first 5 books (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy)

Leviticus (11:9-12) is where shellfish are banned, mixed seed or fabrics (19:19) It is where modern Christians cherry-pick their justifications on being anti-LGBTQ. (Lev. 18:22, 20:13)

Point is, they cherry-pick from the Old Testament when it suits them, and if you look at the rest of the rules in the books they reference that they ignore (e.g. tattoos, touching pig skin, eating pork, shellfish, etc. etc. ) it’s totally fair game to point out the rules they ignore in the same books as the ones they cite.

That’s interesting to hear; somehow my algebra 2 skipped sum notation (and it wasn’t remedially covered in subsequent math classes) but I’ve been writing code for decades now and seeing it in code totally explains the sum notation for me

Damn you that’s what I came here to say well done, well done

Yes! For anyone wanting more reading on the subject, Start here https://prospect.org/economy/neoliberalism-political-success-economic-failure/ Monbiot is also a good primer: https://www.astrid-online.it/static/upload/monb/monbiot_guardian_15_04_16.pdf

The point I wanted to make here is that it matters who has regulatory control in a given sphere, and often private regulators’ interests and considerations will not be the same as those of the public at large. The democratic regulatory state exists (such as it is any more) because prior regimes of private regulation simply did not consider the public interest adequately. There is such a thing today as the EPA because congress in 1970 decided acid rain and rivers on fire wasn’t cool, and all of those ‘self-regulating’ industries out there just weren’t considering their downwind/downstream air-breathing, water-drinking neighbors enough. Likewise, regulatory controls on banking were imposed under the New Deal. The notion of public regulators is, historically speaking, a relatively recent one, and the ongoing political fighting about whether they ought to be public or private really ought to get the attention it deserves instead of being buried under abstract ‘government bad’ rhetoric.

The thing to get about deregulation in this context is that it’s a misleading term- ‘deregulation’ doesn’t mean un-doing regulation, it means handing regulatory authority over from democratically-accountable regulators, to private regulators that are less-accountable and often have interests at odds with those of the public.

In feudal times, regulation of trade or business was left to trade associations or guilds (who got to write their own rules that were typically rubber-stamped by the local nobility’s younger son) and that system more or less translated into today’s modern republics, up until the guilds and trade associations became trusts and monopolies. When the democratic regulatory state emerged to regulate spheres of business like banking and polluting industry because private regulators shat the bed, that was a shot in a war that the old guard business elites haven’t stopped fighting- they saw this as a taking of their power, and have sustained decades of effort to hand public authority back over to private trade associations