as alive as you need me to be
Mormons not believing in the Trinity is a pretty solid argument that, at the very least, they're not Christians in the way nearly all other Christians are Christians.
That puts them in the same bucket as Jehovah's Witnesses, Christian Scientists, Unitarians, Iglesia ni Cristo, and Christadelphians.
... thats why most Christians don't think Mormons are really Christians, that they are instead more like heretics.
Not that I personally have a dog in this fight between the finer points of varying forms of mass shared delusions based on a corpus of hundreds of different texts that have been edited and translated and added to and subtracted from, tens or hundreds of thousands of times, over approximately 2500 years...
... but the idea of the Trinity is a pretty big deal, going back through the entire history of Christianity.
Whole lots of nontrinitarians have been called, and killed for being heretics by whole lots of trinitarians, for... what, roughly... 1750 years?
Yeah that's a pretty solid historical precedent.
Hah, uh, that kind of behavior is actually a gigantic red flag, not cute in any way.
"I'm either extremely insecure, or need you to worship me, or both!"
Fucking run.
Dodge the bullet, literally and figuratively.
And this goes for any persons of any gender or whatever, mixed into this scenario.
This is not cute.
Yep, pretty insane if taken at face value.
My guess would be the gun is meant as a visual metaphor/joke, but uh... yeah, its not actually a wholly implausible literal scenario.
Probably the author/artist has very little real world experience with firearms, would be my guess.
As in, frame perfect execution of some kind of set of inputs, like a speed runner would have to pull off?
No, not in the Matrix canon I can recall off the top of my head.
They're more focused on an... unwavering belief, or faith, in something.
Not any kind of technical, machine-like ability to execute a complex task, with high precision.
The point is being incredibly human in a way that is not machine-like, that's the way(s) out, not in trying to out machine a machine.
EDIT:
As the Architect says to Neo in Matrix 2:
Humph. Hope, it is the quintessential human delusion, simultaneously the source of your greatest strength, and your greatest weakness.
They cannot fully account for, figure out a way to fully contain what you might call the human spirit, or irrational faith of some kind.
Neo's particular variant of this kind of irrational drive... is his love of Trinity.
... its rather sappy, actually, lol.
4 more or less inverts this, it is Trinity's love of Neo that ultimately saves/reawakens him.
They've actually been caught doing this, in some instances.
There was a guy picking up radio signals and chatter from a classified test aircraft or something like thag.
He thought it was weird, reported it to local authorities.
Long story short, the military / government gas lit the fuck out him, told him it might be aliens, keep researching it.
He eventually went pretty much completely insane.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Bennewitz
Do try and keep your wits about you when delving into such stories and theories.
Some are total nonsense spread by grifters, some are innacurate but genuine reports, some are intentional mis and disinfo... and some of it is real.
It's a fucking mess.
I think the word for this is co-opt.
You don't 'debunk' it.
You put your people either in control of, or position them as massively influential figures within it, or coax such people over to your flavor of that kind of messaging.
tetris11 got it, the sprinter from World Record.
Essentially, he's such a top tier athlete, so determined, that he... breaks through the veil of 'reality', in his pursuit of greatness.
Whereas the kid... has an incredibly certain sense of belief in ... more or less, the idea of Neo as a transcended individual, as a kind of means of attaining his own transendence.
... MxO went into more of these methods of either escaping or becoming aware of the Matrix, independently, as basically class build archetypes...
But I have absolutely no idea what the 'canon' status of any of it is, at this point.
Probably just 'not canon', I don't know.
Its also doubly confusing because back when MxO was running... different server shards actually experienced different 'storylines', due to there being a ... roughly every 3 or 6 month ... sort of faction competition for which variant of a major plot point would play out in which way.
So... these different shards all experienced kind of fundentally opposed 'canons'.
... but nobody remembers any of that, these days.
But at the same time....we are our choices and our memories.
Its also possible that... MxO, or a sequel to it was the video game that Neo was working on in Matrix 4.
So... who knows, really, hahah!
pushes a sock into his chest
No, that's the fourth movie.
No, the 4th one.
Watch the AniMatrix.
There are other ways... to get out.
... they are just exceptionally difficult to pull off, and can only be pulled off by exceptional individuals.
... ... and they also do not tend to involve a real world hovercraft crew waiting to retrieve your emaciated, atrophied and basically blind body.
You're on your own.
Yep, its disgusting, major red flag, but shockingly common.
Apparently my standards are too high.
- Jump
Senate rejects extension of health care subsidies as costs are set to rise for millions of Americans
It will, in the sense that the US Treasury is now shifting massive amounts of its debt burdern from longer term bond issuance(5y, 10y, 30y), to shorter term (3m) debt, and then just trying to keep refinancing it, every 3 months.
The Federal Reserve has now lost the ability to actually set bond market intetest rates.
They can raise or lower the interest rate, the bond market is currently laughing at that and setting their own interest rates.
So, what that means is, the next government shutdown will result in even more economic destruction and chaos, even more things we have long taken for granted just disintegrating.
- Jump
Senate rejects extension of health care subsidies as costs are set to rise for millions of Americans
Anyone who was surprised by this needs to retire from having political opinions of any kind, to say nothing of such people who actually hold any political power.
The former should develop humility and realize they are idiots.
The latter should be maimed, defrauded of their wealth, and then forced to endure their own system.
- Jump
Senate rejects extension of health care subsidies as costs are set to rise for millions of Americans
I'm sure he'll be having frantic conversations with the
split personalitiesalternate identitiesmental fabrications of the "median voter" he's constructed in his head.That's not really a joke, for nearly two decades now, he basically invented multiple, imagined "median voters" in his head, gave them complex backstories, frequently refers to them as if they are real, frequently cites "conversations" he has with them, in writing, to justify/explain his thinking process.
Hooray for the gerontocracy, long live decree by dementia!
Its a cult.
What you are trying to describe... is a cult.
These people are brainwashed fanatics, to the point of either intentionally or unintentionally, nearly/effectively or actually committing suicide, for/because of the cultic belief structure.
We saw this with COVID.
Thousands of people, live blogging or live streaming their own deaths, basically caused by their adherence to idiotic nonsense ideas, that they held with the level of conviction of a religious extremist, many of them literally to their last breath.
Its literally a death cult, being a MAGA-type conservative.
They don't believe they exist in "reality", as any one not in the cult would understand it.
They'll drink the KoolAid, they'll off themselves to go to the spaceship behind Hale-Bopp... because nothing can change their core beliefs.
Just because their method of effective/literal suicide is economic/political doesn't make it not a literal death cult.
It really is not that conceptually difficult to understand the basics of how a tariff works.
You can explain it to a middle schooler, without numbers, and ...
(well ok, if we're talking about roughly year 2000 middle schoolers, not roughly 2025 tiktok addict brainrotted middle schoolers)...
... most of them would get it.
Just like how most of them could be taught that drinking poisoned KoolAid will kill you.
EDIT:
The BITE Model of Cults:
https://freedomofmind.com/cult-mind-control/bite-model-pdf-download/
Just go checkoff each one of the subcomponents of each main component there, that you routinely see MAGA adherents/leaders being subjected to, or enforcing on other MAGA adherents/leaders.
I'm not even kind of joking, it's literally a death cult.
This is animal abuse.
It's inhumane to forcibly gorge so many leopards.
... sob ... they can only eat so much!!! ... sob ...
Well shit, I was hopin' you'd say that.
Donny!
Got a job for ya!
Yep, and the exact reason the Founders were such sticklers on a seperation between church and state... on a secular society...
....was that the US was more or less initially settled by a bunch of Christian religious extremists of varying flavors, who all couldn't hack it in Europe, and they knew that if you let the government start explicitly picking favorites with religions?
Well, then US history would look a lot more like (what was to them, fairly recent) European history.
Aka, a whole bunch of mostly Christians killing mostly other different Christians, with an occasional, quite notable pogrom against Jews, or crusade against Muslims.
... As we can currently see... they evidently did not establish this paradigm strongly enough to withstand just a few centuries of persistent and dogged US Christian Extremeism.
I guess at this point I'm just waiting for Utah to claim its own Greater Deseret boundaries and assert its own independence, maybe when the US is embroiled in just another actual, full fledged land war with Mexico.
Give it about a decade, I'd guess.