One sword, at least thy rights shall guard @kasunex - Tumblr Blog

Char Siu Bao (Steamed BBQ Pork Buns) 叉烧包 This char siu bao recipe makes the fluffiest steamed buns filled with saucy chunks of Chinese BBQ pork in a sweet savory glaze. These classic dim sum buns use char siu, hoisin sauce, and a pillowy low gluten flour dough that cracks open beautifully on top.

Recipe: https://omnivorescookbook.com/steamed-char-siu-bao/

#Culinary Inspiration

directactionforhope

Every time you catch yourself going, "Fuck, are humans just inherently evil and naturally inclined to selfishness and harm???" you HAVE to remember that that's literally a core ideal of Christianity.

So if it feels inescapable and like evidence of it is everywhere, whether at times or always, that might just because you're in a Western country where you're surrounded by Christians who believe that, fundamentally, in their worldview. And also they talk and make art about it all the time and run the vast majority of news outlets. And spent over a thousand years burning any art or texts that disagreed with them. Etc. etc.

If you're gonna come to as drastic and painful a conclusion as that, at least take the time first to make sure you're not working with biased evidence (surrounded by too many people and cultural products that believe original sin is real)

And if it turns out the feeling WAS partly the result of cultural Christianity, then hey, that's great news, because it means there's that much (and it really is SO MUCH) less evidence that humans inherently suck. Which is good, because we don't

vasyan-pupkinyan

ignore that cultural trauma, ask an archeologist / paleontologist.

how often do we find human remains / burials attributable to a peaceful death of old age, or at least to disease / wild animals? and attributable to human violence, i.e. with traces of weapon impacts?

to use an old quote, the last ape became the first human not when he picked up a stick to reach some fruit, but when he used that stick to bash another ape over the head and take away his fruit.

directactionforhope

I disagree with pretty much all of that, actually. Modern archeology is only just in the process of pulling itself out of hundreds of years of racism, bias, colonialism, disproven assumptions, widespread graverobbing, and massive, blatant pseudoscience; many ideas, theories, and publications in the field that are older than about 20 years are of highly questionable provenance.

I personally am much more convinced and compelled by newer theories that, if any piece of technology made us human, it was not the weapon - it was the carrier bag, the story, and/or fire. (But not fire with the primary purpose of violence, mind you - fire with the primary purpose of heat and food and sanitation)

Here's a quote on this from one of my absolute favorite thinkers and writers, Ursula K. Le Guin:

If you haven't got something to put it in, food will escape you- even something as uncombative and unresourceful as an oat. You put as many as you can into your stomach while they are handy, that being the primary container; but what about tomorrow morning when you wake up and it's cold and raining and wouldn't it be good to have just a few handfuls of oats to chew on and give little Oom to make her shut up, but how do you get more than one stomachful and one handful home? So you get up and go to the damned soggy oat patch in the rain, and wouldn't it be a good thing if you had something to put Baby Oo Oo in so that you could pick the oats with both hands? A leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container. A holder. A recipient. The first cultural device was probably a recipient. . . . Many theorizers feel that the earliest cultural inventions must have been a container to hold gathered products and some kind of sling or net carrier. So says Elizabeth Fisher in Women's Creation (McGraw-Hill, 1975). But no, this cannot be. Where is that wonderful, big, long, hard thing, a bone, I believe, that the Ape Man first bashed somebody with in the movie and then, grunting with ecstasy at having achieved the first proper murder, flung up into the sky...? I don't know. I don 't even care. I'm not telling that story. We've heard it, we've all heard all about all the sticks and spears and swords, the things to bash and poke and hit with, the long, hard things, but we have not heard about the thing to put things in, the container for the thing contained. That is a new story. That is news... It sometimes seems that that story is approaching its end. Lest there be no more telling of stories at all , some of us out here in the wild oats, amid the alien corn, think we'd better start telling another one, which maybe people can go on with when the old one's fin- ished. Maybe. The trouble is , we've all let ourselves become part of the killer story, and so we may get finished along with it. Hence it is with a certain feeling of urgency that I seek the nature, subject, words of the other story, the untold one, the life story.

-via Ursula K. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. Originally published 1986, new edition with forewords and commentaries published 2024.

kasunex

See, but this is only half the equation. Christianity does say humans are inherently sinful, but so too does it say humans are capable of great good by way of the Holy Spirit. The entire concept that flawed people or even flawed institutions are capable of redemption is a fundamentally Christian one.

While you don't exactly go into detail about what makes humans good or bad, my guess is that it's based on Christian moral foundation. The overwhelming majority of Christian criticism is ironically from such. Read about Ancient Rome and Greece (or hell, most pagan societies) and their horrific might makes right mindset and tell me that Christian morals have negatively impacted society.

#Catholicism #History

I feel like I'm falling out of date in saying this but I'm honestly really getting sick of massive open-world games.

Oblivion and Skyrim blew my mind when I first played them and both still hold a special place. But they came out in an era where most games weren't like that. Wind Waker was the biggest game I played before those two.

Modern open worlds just feel too large, overwhelming even, and what's more so is how many of them have largely set characters rather than vast opportunities. You can be who you want in Oblivion and Skyrim, you can only decide who Arthur is in a game like RDR2.

Modern gaming feels bigger and bulkier than ever before and yet it also feels somehow much more overwhelming than it did before without much stronger motivations for engaging with that complexity.

It's part of why I still haven't touched the Switch Zelda games despite loving Zelda previously.

#Random Thoughts

segamascott

#Hardcore Shitposting

kasunex

The shift of the Republican Party from the party of Yankee anti-slavery activists into the modern diet fascist party we see today is honestly both fascinating and depressing. It's like a real life case of political flanderization. As is the Democratic Party's shift from the party of white populism to centrist progressives, though in the opposite sense.

nagi-kirima-style-cateran

Took a class from a guy in undergrad whose field of study was communist analysis of 20th century American history. He disputed this kind of claim by saying that the general principles of the parties hadn’t changed: Republicans were still the party of strong federal government while Democrats were still the party of strong state government and that the actual positions underlying this view of federalism were irrelevant.

Personally I thought the guy was full of shit but it was an interesting claim to ponder.

kasunex

That view is extremely ironic given the way the Republicans, at least for a long time prior to Trump, championed themselves as the party of state's rights. But these days, the Democrats do seem to respect state autonomy much more than the Republicans do.

That said, it doesn't hold up to the New Deal era of FDR through LBJ where the Democrats were synonymous with the Federal Government. Hell, you could argue that switch started as early as Woodrow Wilson, or you could trace the origins even further back to Andrew Jackson.

#Social Discourse #Politics