BC SOCIETY
Saved by @CodyyyGardner

Okay folks, you all have been very kind over the last few days. I promise this account hasn't been highjacked. There's a lot going on & evangelical proximity to it is maddening.

But I promised you a thread about cancel culture, socioeconomics, & vocation.

 First, let me say that I believe peer pressure & shunning happens in every social group. I believe the group can rally against the individual to force them comply w/ established norms & established powers. It is feature of human community.
So I don't disbelieve that something akin to "cancel culture" exists. But living in & ministering in working class spaces, I've never understood the emotion attached to popular iteration.
Sure, we talk about political correctness & the pressure to not say things, but the cancel culture narrative always felt imported somehow. Like, it wasn't organic to the way we moved thru the world.
So it's always puzzled me. The emotion that is. The fear. The panic of the woke mob coming for your job. Why is it framed this way? None of this made sense to me until I started mixing more w/ mid-upper class conservatives, particularly Xians.
Exhibit A: Lunch w/ a woman w/ college-aged children in private university who tells me how worried she is that they'll be black-balled at school & lose opportunities & career path.
Exhibit B: Anonymous commentors on Twitter who when I challenge their anonynimity tell me that they don't use their real names & pics b/c they're afraid they'll be fired for opinions that they share online.
Exhibit C: SENATOR Josh Hawley claiming a canceled book contract equates to loss of individual liberty & infringement of rights.
And all I can think is "Have you all never lost a job in your life? Have you never experienced work insecurity? What makes you believe that your position will be there tomorrow?"
Again, my point is not about the legitmacy of leveraging work against people. My point is that only a certain type of worker expects that their job will always be there (barring cancel culture of course). Only a certain level of worker thinks a career path is a right.
B/c where I live, work instability is more norm than not. And our own family has cycled thru 2-3 periods of unemployment brought about, ironically enough, by philosophy differences w/ CHURCHES that my husband pastored. (Ain't no cancel culture like church cancel culture amirite?)
So I'm no stranger to feeling the pressure to conform, to knowing that your beliefs might put you at odds w/ your employer, to facing the loss of work & income for speaking truthfully.
But my empathy for the dilemma doesn't mean that I share the assumption that we're owed work or that our children are owed a certain career path. (I say this carefully b/c I know the devastation that our own family has experienced when career dreams are shattered.)
And this I think is a significant blindspot of the faith & work conversation: What happens when you're locked out of the C-Suite? What happens when you can't expect a certain career or that work will be there tomorrow?
A robust theology of vocation teaches us that we'll be okay. It teaches us that we work "as unto the Lord" & that "my God shall supply my every need." A robust theolgy of vocation rests not on a certain career path but on a certain God.
In this respect, I simply cannot share the panic I see among conservative Christians regarding cancel cutlure. Does it exist? Sure. Every community, every culture has ways of policing its boundaries. The Q is whether I should fear it.
I do not. B/c I know that ultimately my calling & vocation is sure w/ the Almighty. If *he* calls me to speak things that set me at odds w/ my employer or publisher, I best obey him & not them.
And this I think is another part of the dilemma: Too many of us want impunity to say & do whatever WE want, not whatever we're called to. We have become our own masters & none shall master us. But this is not the way of Christ, either.
What we do & what we say is direct by the One we're called to serve. And if HE calls you to speak truths that go against your cultural norms--whether in the church or outside--you can better believe that he'll preserve you as you obey him. BUT...
As the Apostle Peter wrote, make sure "none of you suffer as a murderer, or as a thief, or as an evildoer, or as a busybody in other men's matters" (I Peter 4:15)

2021 version: Don't get canceled b/c you did something that deserves cancelling.
IN SUMMARY:

Work is good, but no one owes you a career path. Live peacefully w/ all men, & be willing to go against the flow when necessary. Protect your integrity & know that your God will supply your needs.

But don't be a jerk b/c if you are, that's on you.

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this was never true and that fact was known and knowable.

let's look.


above is the plot of social restriction and NPI vs total death per million. there is 0 R2. this means that the variables play no role in explaining one another.

we can see this same relationship between NPI and all cause deaths.

this is devastating to the case for NPI.


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barring massive and implausible coincidence, it's essentially impossible to cause something and not correlate to it, especially 51 times.

this would seem to pose some very serious questions for those claiming that lockdowns work, those basing policy upon them, and those claiming this is the side of science.

there is no science here nor any data. this is the febrile imaginings of discredited modelers.

this has been clear and obvious from all over the world since the beginning and had been proven so clearly by may that it's hard to imagine anyone who is actually conversant with the data still believing in these responses.

everyone got the same R
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Ready?

Create a private foundation and give it all away. 1/

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Meanwhile, the private foundation is as close as we come to Downton Abbey and the landed aristocracy in this country. It's a largely untaxed pot of money that grows significantly over time, and those who control them tend to entrench their own privileges and those of their kin. 4

Here's how it works for a big lotto winner:

1. Win the prize.
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I have been working on pandemic outbreaks for 15 years.

There is a misunderstanding of the difference between the response in much of the West, versus successful countries (including New Zealand and Australia).

Summarizing:

1.Reactive versus proactive and goal oriented.

1/-

2.Mitigation (slowing transmission) versus elimination (stopping transmission)

3.Gradually responding to increasing levels of infection by imposing greater restrictions which enables the infection rate to grow (red zone strategy), …

2/

versus starting with high restrictions to arrest transmission and relaxing restrictions only when the number of new cases is so low that contact tracing or localized short term action can stop community transmission (green zone strategy, including localized "fire fighting").

3/

4.Trying to keep economic activity and travel as open as possible but perpetuating the economic harm and imposing yoyo restrictions, versus making an initial sacrifice of economic activity and travel in order to benefit from the rapid restoration of normal economic activity.

4/

5.Focusing attention on few individuals resistant to social action because of shortsightedness or selfishness, versus recognizing the vast majority do the right thing if given clear guidance and support, which is what matters for success, as elimination is a robust strategy.

5/
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Did you realize there is a movement to normalize anti-white hatred? It works with white guilt and psych-op to dehumanize white people. They are working to dehumanize "whiteness". Do not make the mistake of thinking this is an isolated incident because it has been going on for ...

some time. I have collected nearly 100 articles in the last few yrs.
Today there was a whistleblower from Coca Cola, who revealed classes they were to take to learn how to "try to be less white". The classes are provided by Linked In on Linked In.


Many large companies are not only doing diversity training, but "What It Means to be White" seminars. Inside our government seminars are available. Recently we learned the Defense Secretary said he is going to root out extremism,

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The reason that so many conservative evangelicals these days appear to be moral relativists is that they *are* moral relativists.

They would deny this, of course. But that doesn’t make it any less true. Here's why.

They’ve bought into the premise that all statements are either fact or opinion: facts are objective and verifiable; and everything else is opinion—subjective and unverifiable. In other words, they've bought into full-fledged modernism.

From there, the secular path to moral relativism places all moral statements in the “opinion” category. On this view, morality is subjective—dependent on cultural context, historical background and the like.

Conservative evangelicals recoil from this approach, as they should.

So instead, they place morality in the “fact” category, claiming that moral truth is objective and empirically verifiable.

And how is moral truth empirically verified? The Bible, of course. Problem solved.

This is tempting, for two reasons. First, Scripture is entirely true; and much of that truth pertains to morality.

Second, apart from special revelation, it’s difficult to imagine where we might go to find empirical verification of moral truth—you can't *see* moral properties.
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