I've been to the language classes for Russian. The JW's don't teach you to speak any language, they teach you the words to say to place the rags and lead a study.
Anony Mous
JoinedPosts by Anony Mous
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Any of you JW super linguists learn to speak Japanese? If so, how’d it go? ;)
by Diogenesister inhi i’ve been learning to draw portraits, and one style i had a go at when drawing young children was a sort of kawaii or cute japanese style.
i wanted to make gifts of these drawings so looked into writing in japanese script to add to the aesthetic.. but oh wow!!
three types of script?!!
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Why do Americans have to pay so much for College???
by RubaDub ini know there is a huge college/university lobby here in the us that lives off of students paying, in some cases, enormous amounts of money just to attend.. putting politics aside, if that is possible, (and i am not a bernie sanders guy by any means), but how can we pay for pre-kindergarten, kindergarten, elementary school, junior high, high school, and then throw a huge debt to someone who wants to continue learning?
can't the us (public and state universities) afford four more years for young people to get on a career path without having to, in some cases, take out a mortgage/loan more than the cost of some homes?
then, (and nothing against immigrants, i am married to one), but then the us has to "import" students from other countries to fill the needs that we should be supplying here.
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Anony Mous
The reason college is expensive in the US for some is because the government pays for large portions of the population to go there. 85-90% of college students have some form of assistance which means they pay very little to nothing out of pocket. Only if you make significant income (>$250k), do your children not qualify for government assistance.
And for those in Europe and other places where we get 'free college' - full tuition out-of-pocket including room and board averages ~$50k/year at a government-backed guaranteed ~2% interest rates loan you're not obligated to pay back until 1 year after you finish college. And that's "high", $200k in debt to (if you choose well such as a STEM field), you typically can get a job starting between $50-100k with <18% effective income taxes. A few years later you should be making $100-250k/year. You should be able to pay back the loans with the tax savings alone vs your average European country.
Off course, when the government gives free money, there is no limit to the cost because the government will always pay more, they'll just take it out of your taxes, so the tuition goes up. And with free money, people don't make good choices either, you can get a degree in just about anything for free and as long as you take one class, you don't have to pay back any debts either. So people get degrees in the liberal arts, rack up debts and don't have to be responsible, until they need to get a job and they realize the degree in lesbian dance theory does nothing for them, so now they're demanding the government forgive their debt and give them MORE free stuff and guarantee a job?
I would suggest that public school for K-12 is not very useful either. The better option is to have school choice, vouchers for those that don't have the income to pay for private schools and reduce or eliminate the system of school taxes. In my area we pay upwards of $1B/year into the school system or ~$35k/student and we get dilapidated buildings, class sizes of ~20-30 and the school system has ~$500M in debt. You can pay a private tutor handsomely including supplies for every 4 children with that money.
American college, as European college is still very cheap. Even at those 'exorbitant' tuition rates, the government also pays ~50% of operating costs for any privately owned University through research grants and other funding. So your college should really cost twice as much as it does today, or without government assistance, it would probably cost about as much as it does now, just with less administrative overhead.
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Are Watchtower/ Awake considered religious magazines by Christians?
by dydeonwl inthe watchtower and awake have been considered as the most read magazines by christians.
do you think that all christians agree on it?.
source:.
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Anony Mous
I would take the numbers with a grain of salt. If the stats are true (93M Awake per issue and 42M Watchtowers), every single JW places an average of 15 Awake magazines and similarly large amount of 7 Watchtowers bi-weekly (which was 44/month/JW a few years ago and since they've gone monthly now it is 22/month)
Even as pioneer I didn't get anywhere close to 30 magazines per month, and they claim every JW turning in a report card does this?
Interesting is that the 'study' Watchtowers have a distribution of 14M, whereas they're only for JW's and there's only ~6M of those with half of the organization living in situations where it is not only hard to get the timely delivery of the rags, they are in areas where many people would have difficulty reading. Someone's seen counting with a fork?
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Jehovah's Witnesses Mega Halls
by RolRod ini was thinking about this recently.
the society owns all the kingdom halls and with desperate need of money, their closing down and selling off properties.
consolidating congregations seems to be the order of the day.
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Anony Mous
They're already doing that, for the "foreign language field", circuit overseer visits and even for the memorial, they're now using the assembly halls (at a "voluntary donation" of course).
The biggest problem with the large assembly halls is visitors, the cost of heating and lighting giant spaces is huge.
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Proportional Representation vs Electoral Collages
by Simon inthe craziness of first-past-the-post elections .... we'll no doubt have to now live through the scotts demanding another referendum, because we may take their lands, but we will never take their freedom!
and so they want to be free of the uk, where they have a disproportionate influence in parliament, and be a little dot that's part of the eu.
yup, freedom.. but anyway, as it stands right now they have 48 seats after getting 1.2m votes.
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Anony Mous
The question is whether you want direct democracy, oppression of the majority so to say, or a representative government where each area of the country, typically divided into cities and groups of towns, gets an equal vote.
Good and long-term governments are built upon representative governments because each area (eg. farming, fishing, cities, ...) get a say in their policies. If you have a majority vote for everything, a majority can always agree to persecute the minority, whether the minority is rich people, black people, gay people. Hence why direct democracies usually lead to bad outcomes unless you can make every choice between two highly contrasting ideas (eg. kill all the blacks vs kill all the whites)
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What’s Your Opinion of Adam Schiff?
by minimus ini’ve heard some people praise him for his zeal against president trump.
others have not been so praiseworthy toward the california congressman.. today he was so concerned that trump might be so emboldened now that he has won acquittal, that he suggests that trump might make a deal with russia and sell them the state of alaska.
😐.
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Anony Mous
He looks and talks like a politician, he's really good at it, he's a good lawyer I'd say from the arguments he made at the impeachment. But he comes across as a lawyer and not in the good way, more in the way of "that guy looks like he's defending a mafioso", the way he looks sideways all the time when he makes a statement about his case.
So you have good Schiff - on the stand, defending a legal argument, even if it isn't logically consistent, he'll stand there and defend it - and you have bad Schiff, when you know he's lying, he's looking left and right, and he did that for 2 days straight in the Senate and then he attempted to do it during Q&A time as well.
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New Wuhan coronavirus around.....
by mikeflood innew coronavirus wreaking havoc.....first case detected in the us one hour ago....six deaths already in china.....hope it gets controlled soon.....
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Anony Mous
@DesirousofChange: again, don't let a few tarnish the many. The NYT has been a sensational rag since Hillary ran vs Obama and they lost tons and tons of subscribers due to dishonest coverage. They never recovered, same goes for CNN and MSNBC, they lost tons of viewers over the last decade and are now relegated to sensational headlines and opinion pieces without substance.
Luckily we do have a rather large body of small independent journalist sites (eg the Daily Wire) that are open about their biases. I get all my news from independent channels on YouTube and podcasts which can go in deep and honest detail of a particular issue.
As far as the topic at hand, what I got from my sources is that it's a potentially major issue, it won't spread far beyond China because we have better healthcare and an open media, similar to the SARS and other outbreaks in China. Also, it's a deadlier virus than the cold but it is still a cold which doesn't mean automatic death and it's relatively easy to contain and prevent spreading.
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Just saw this on Facebbok, by Barbara Anderson, Disfellowshiping cancelled by "worldly" Court !
by Phizzy inexcuse the translation to english not being perfect ,.
barbara anderson.
33 mins · .
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Anony Mous
No, the court cannot force association. But the legal entity and its rules falls under jurisdiction of the courts (same goes for the US) and it's not uncommon for disputes within an organization, even non-profits and churches, to be adjudicated in court (eg employment issues - you can't fire someone on illegal grounds such as religion even if you're the Catholic Church)
The rules of the JW organization can be adjudicated by a "worldly" court and often are in, for example, child custody cases. In my case elders were disallowed from disfellowshipping me because it would be prejudicing and damaging to the relationship between me and my child.
There are a number of cases where the actions of the JWs get limited, eg you can get a restraining order against the Watchtower entities from their representatives contacting and visiting you. As long as the court does not limit the constitutional protections, which would be the case of a blanket ban on preaching in a geographical area, civil cases in courts can and do result in all sorts of sanctions on the WTBTS, but the WTBTS often can and does get gag orders in place as well, especially if they end up settling rather than litigating.
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Jordan Peterson - Messiah or Poseur?
by cofty ina jp video came up on my youtube feed last week - he was on a panel in front of a huge audience and some poor disturbed guy ran on stage and started crying and wailing to peterson that he needed his help.
it was agonising to watch.. what was even more disturbing was the comments section.
i do not exaggerate when i say that dozens of people were extolling peterson's wisdom as if jesus had come again.
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Anony Mous
He is rarely asked to clarify, he often gets asked what his position is, often with the goal of classifying him into the "ultra-religious right wing cook" which he understandably never answers outright. He also doesn't want to lie and his viewpoint on Christianity is rarely contained in a single sound bite.
He's admitted to not being a Christian in the strictest sense of belonging to one or another church or believing in the unerring of the Bible but he does believe that the Judeo-Christian message is important in our society and has influenced our morality and it's hard to separate it both from our collective as well as his individual psyche.
I think he struggles with disconnecting the influence of Christianity in his own thinking and he hasn't made up his mind as to whether the whole thing is a psychological byproduct or something he should actually believe.
I don't know the man personally but I do understand where he is coming from when he doesn't want to expound on his position, these days people just want to classify you as religious and then they can safely ignore you and your position because you aren't an atheist.
I am an atheist myself but I do believe that there is a morally superior message in the Judeo-Christian faiths compared to eg Islam or Buddhism which has caused the West to develop as it has.
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Jordan Peterson - Messiah or Poseur?
by cofty ina jp video came up on my youtube feed last week - he was on a panel in front of a huge audience and some poor disturbed guy ran on stage and started crying and wailing to peterson that he needed his help.
it was agonising to watch.. what was even more disturbing was the comments section.
i do not exaggerate when i say that dozens of people were extolling peterson's wisdom as if jesus had come again.
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Anony Mous
He is a tremendous intellectual that has a great amount of insight in 20th century history and how it's starting to repeat itself in the 21st century with the rise of socialism/communism and far-left (similar to Nazi and Stalinist) ideas.
I don't necessarily agree with all his analysis but he does a decent job at explaining why his ideas are valid. He does fall into the Professor trap where he tries to over explain or treat his audience as students with a significant level of prerequisite knowledge.
As far as his religiosity and ideas around it, as he has made clear, he doesn't want to expound on a topic that requires a good background knowledge, because he'd be taken out of context, hence he won't argue about those things because it takes a lot of time to properly explain a position. He also won't go into personal religious or "did Jesus really do miracles" because according to one interview, there is nothing to be gained in those debates because it depends on what you believe and how you define the words and which facts you accept. He does have a series of lectures on the Judeo-Christian values and ideas from the Bible.
All-in-all, he is honest about his views, he is open for honest discussions and when it comes to people and politics, all around brilliant in his debates with journalists and sees right through when the media is trying to entrap him into a sound bite.