Have compassion for immigrants, lawmakers urged -- 2008 article

cookiecaper

I guess I hadn't submitted this before, thought I had. Marlin K. Jensen of the Seventy was assigned to attend this forum in early 2008 and urge lawmakers to be kind in their approach to immigration reform.

And then Mormons in Arizona pushed through their repugnant, anti-Constitution and anti-human-rights immigration law, and now Mormons in Utah are trying to push through the same thing, though we've had GAs explicitly tell them not to do so. But they'll still argue they're in the right, along with the Glenn Beck disciples. What else do they want?

cookiecaper

I mean that as part of the sentence, "The connection is that to outsiders, since polygamy went through the same...Latter-day Saints should be sympathetic." The outsiders think that, that's what I mean.

People do want you to say "I'm so sorry, they did it to me 120+ years ago", because they think that it is the same thing to deny polygamy as it is to deny same-sex marriage. Clearly they are mistaken though, and it is not.

cookiecaper

The connection is that to outsiders, since polygamy went through basically the same process where the majority demonized the practice and vilified its practitioners, as the "moral majority" now does with same-sex marriages, Latter-day Saints should be sympathetic to this kind of thing.

What they miss is that homosexual marriage and plural marriage are opposites. Homosexual marriage is the halting of family, the negation of Priesthood governance and authority, the lack of progeny, etc., and plural marriage is the eternal continuation of family, the increase of Priesthood governance, the creation of many children as well as their upbringings, care, and education. We are opposed to the one that destroys family and in favor of the one that improves it when the practice thereof is authorized.

cookiecaper

Also, this Cufon thing is interesting. It's cool, but really should be using @font-face for everything possible; perhaps you could try implementing that instead of using individual canvas elements. Maybe a new version of Cufon implements it?

cookiecaper

Thanks for posting this, I like the arrangement a lot and have listened to it a few times since yesterday.

cookiecaper

An interesting discussion, I think. To my mind, the main barrier is that we don't have the funding to dedicate to that kind of effort. The Church has already made their contribution on the matter, which is the Study Helps and footnotes in our current Standard Works. Unless someone can convince LDS investors to bankroll such a project, I don't see it happening.

cookiecaper

Created this to promote zionlist.com and provide off-site news updates in a more canonical format. The big aggregators can add this easily and it should be easier to get people down with that format, and then drop news/hints about zionlist a lot to try and get more activity.

If you're a regular reader of ZL, thanks for your patronage, I like you a lot. This thing doesn't take anything away from here, just hoping it will get more to happen here soon.

cookiecaper

I agree that it's a disappointing redesign for the main page. They've removed some functionality and the H is distracting and overly gaudy.

The temple subpages are an improvement, though, I think, with horizontal centering and clearly defined navigation.

Did you not know of this site before? You're right that it isn't official but I've found it much more useful than the Church's temple pages.

cookiecaper

The comments on there are really crazy. What is with that?

cookiecaper

Well, first of all, I wouldn't categorize Benson's philosophy as "neoconservative". It is classical conservative. Neoconservatives believe in government intervention and war when it suits them and blind party loyalty; see Bush, who pushed through a couple rounds of bailouts and had all of the neocon pundits singing his praises, but when Obama does anything remotely similar, it's this big horrible thing, as just one example.

One might be correct in saying that many misinterpret Benson's statements as endorsements of the Republican Party, seen in America as the "conservative" party. This is really disappointing because today's Republican Party represents almost nothing that Benson espouses, but I don't think this is Benson's fault; the blame lies on the uninformed masses that accept punditry without question and take Benson's remarks as implicit perpetual endorsements of what the common psyche deems the "conservative" party.

I think that when the Lord elevates an apostle to President of the Church, it's an elevation of their previous work as well. Everyone pays more attention to the prophet's teachings, whether they were given before or after his assumption of that calling. As such, I think that when the Lord suffers a certain apostle to become Church President, the Lord is intentionally placing additional emphasis of that specific apostle's teachings over the entirety of the apostle's tenure, not just any forthcoming teachings after the assumption of the office.

In light of all this, I think that Benson's political rhetoric is an important guideline for Church members, but I think that only insofar as it is appropriately applied. As discussed earlier, members who assume that Benson's teachings imply or necessitate continued patronage of "apostate" political creeds are obviously misapplying the teachings of the Prophet, because no such statement was ever made.

Likewise, those who assume that Benson's "proper role of government" forbids negotiation with those of differing persuasion are misappropriating the teaching as well, as are those who assume that we must pretend we have a legitimate free market and operate as if a hypothetical ideal capitalism free from government interference exists in our nation.

I think the best thing to do is just to encourage depth-of-thought among members. That would solve many of these problems. I don't know if it's generational or what, but people by and large, including church members, seem to find external propaganda channels authoritative and do not really question the claims they hear from TV. There is such an abundance of misinformation and a propensity to lick it up, and we need to find ways to stop that.

cookiecaper

They took this painting off of the page, now. Isn't that interesting?

cookiecaper

From http://www.ldschurchtemples.com/kansascity/

cookiecaper

I think it's just a further demonstration that many of the Saints want to mix true doctrine with philosophies of men so that they can fit in better. They do it everywhere, they want to be like everyone else.

People should realize that Mormonism is not the religion for you if you just want to fit in. We're a peculiar people and we'll only seem stranger and stranger as the world delves deeper and deeper into apostasy. It's something you might as well get comfortable with.

cookiecaper

I actually think it's a little absurd that people are so interested in that article that there are 91 comments on it. That doesn't really make sense to me.

As for its claims, that might work fine in places where public transit is functional, but that's a pretty small percentage of the overall territory covered by the Church. In the US, for instance, only a few cities have practically usable transportation systems for people without cars. Almost everywhere else, even if there is some transit like a light rail or something, you have to have a car to get where you're going (like the light rail station).

cookiecaper

I agree with this too. I think that part of the reason the law of consecration is specifically mentioned in the temple is because the Lord is attempting to get people to at least accept that law of sharing of money and temporal materials so that they will be ready to accept the law of plural marriage that requires a much more personal and intimate form of emotional sharing.

I just wish people would start taking these things seriously. I feel like so many in the Church just go about their lives as normal Gentiles, and that they don't want to own up to their peculiarities and special callings because it's more comfortable to be like everyone else. They do what they need to do to get a temple recommend and then they're satisfied and feel little additional responsibility. I want to see that change.

cookiecaper

Word. There's some summaries below. I'd like to hear your take and position on the general matter.

cookiecaper

Well, I don't really think people should move to Missouri now unless they feel inspired to do so. I just used the scriptural references to the necessity of acquiring land as an illustration that there are many things in the scriptures which people are missing, and that we must learn and practice our scriptures very well if we're ever going to become what we've been commanded to be. See D&C 84:53-59:

53 And by this you may know the righteous from the wicked, and that the whole world groaneth under sin and darkness even now.

54 And your minds in times past have been darkened because of unbelief, and because you have treated lightly the things you have received—

55 Which vanity and unbelief have brought the whole church under condemnation.

56 And this condemnation resteth upon the children of Zion, even all.

57 And they shall remain under this condemnation until they repent and remember the new covenant, even the Book of Mormon and the former commandments which I have given them, not only to say, but to do according to that which I have written—

58 That they may bring forth fruit meet for their Father’s kingdom; otherwise there remaineth a scourge and judgment to be poured out upon the children of Zion.

59 For shall the children of the kingdom pollute my holy land? Verily, I say unto you, Nay.

This Church has been under commandment to build Zion since its first generation. Not many generations of Saints have taken that commandment seriously. I want to get people to take it seriously so that our generations can be those blessed to build the Holy City.

To me, part of taking that commandment to build Zion seriously means searching the scriptures diligently for things we can do to help. I think that the several times the D&C implores the Saints to purchase lands in and around the Center Place is still applicable, and I don't really understand why people think that that's not necessary anymore. It's black and white in the D&C that the Lord wants His people to obtain lands as He gives unto them power to do so.

I haven't moved to Missouri, but I actually grew up over the state line in Kansas, about twenty miles from Independence.

I feel like we're needed where we are right now, too, and I'm not suggesting that there should be a mass migration to MO. In fact, I don't know that there ever will be; many are waiting around for the prophet to announce it, but that doesn't seem practical to me. The New Jerusalem will be built by the righteous who were gathered up to the area by the Lord, and I am somewhat skeptical that these righteous will be gathered by general commandment of the prophet. I think they will come on orders delivered specifically to them by the Lord.

The Lord has commanded His people to gather up lands there for the usage of Zion, and I expect the Saints to fulfill that as they are given the ability to do so. That's what I'm talking about.

I do think there's a lot of value in remaining dispersed generally. We are still in the gathering phase. Part of the reason I created zionlist is so we could get to know good, Zion-level people, so we can emulate them, associate with them, and learn and socialize with them. There's a lot of good people and good Saints out there and I think that they must network and find each other and gather in from their scattered status emotionally before they do so physically.

I think that there will be a lot of cool and awesome things happening soon. I hope that we can all qualify for them.

cookiecaper

A few things.

I like reddit and its format but I knew that I would never be able to get a good representative population of Saints there, and I knew that even if I could we would rarely be able to have a discussion amidst all of the patronizing and trolling dealt out to theists. reddit has a specific niche and I don't think it will ever have much appeal outside of it, both because of the system itself as well as the users and content usually posted to it.

So, I wanted a place that was free from the major stigmas and turn-offs associated with the people and content on reddit for our own people to gather to and use. I think that the aggregation format is helpful to people and that this site could people informed and harbor many great and helpful discussions.

I want to make some money but that concern is rather tertiary at the moment. Most important is to get some people here and develop a good autonomous community.

I also thought it would be a good technical experience to set up a reddit installation. Reddit open-sourced their codebase a couple of years ago and I've wanted to make something with it ever since.

It was really easy to get this site going because it just meant uploading and configuration and hacking reddit in a few places, which played an important role in its creation, too. ; )

cookiecaper

I know a lot more about Linux than BSD. I've done some tinkering with Linux programming but all I've done on BSD in way of kernel development basically amounts to reading changelogs.

I don't think Linux is going anywhere. I'm sure BSD's influence will continue to grow within its sphere and common deployments, but I don't see any major shift happening in that space. Linux will continue to dominate imo.

There's just too much integration and investment there already. I agree that the bloat in mainline and the shift of focus away from optimization is disappointing, but I think it would happen with the BSDs too if they had the same kind of prominence in the marketplace.

I've also seen quotes from Linus and others closely involved that they're concerned about the number of performance regressions so I hope that soon enough they'll do something about it. I think an occasional release focused solely on performance improvements or something like that might help.

ZFS is old news now. btrfs is coming down the pipe in the next year or so so for the most part people are content to wait for that, as far as I can tell. Especially with all of the weird things going on around Sun right now.

cookiecaper

Yeah, I agree. The subject came up in the first place in a thread about general frustrations with the membership. The revisionist attitude of most in the Church toward the history and doctrinal basis for plural marriage is one of my greatest pet peeves, so I made a passing mention of it. The place freaked the crap out that someone would suggest plural marriage is not evil and that's brought us to this point.

I guess I just wish they'd be intellectually honest about the nature of these things. It's fine to be uncomfortable or to have doubts or whatever, but the smear campaign that occurs against our early leaders and against an eternal doctrine is greatly irritating to me because it's completely dishonest to espouse such false teachings.

I'm doing my best to ignore the thread now because I do believe it's gone on too long and that it's basically just morphed into stubborn people on both sides trying to be right instead of a useful doctrinal discussion.

I also believe that the prophets will bring it to the Church generally when the Church generally is prepared to receive it, and attempting to step out of line with that example just leads to weakening of testimony and other bad things for those not sufficiently advanced to bear the doctrine.

We must remember that prophets are prophets for the Church generally, however, and that we are prophets for ourselves and our own families and stewardships.

I kind of regret allowing myself to get dragged so deeply into it. : (

cookiecaper

I really don't like Harry Reid.

I don't think he's been more influential than Glenn Beck. The average Mormon won't accept your philosophies if you don't come in the name of Republicanism, even if you're supposedly "one of them". :\

cookiecaper

This talk was surprisingly informative, imo. I like it quite a lot and I received several insights I did not expect. I may comment on them in more detail shortly, must go for now.

cookiecaper

Tell me you're not one of those guys.

I'm not one of those guys. To the extent that I am one of those guys, we're not nearly pretentious enough to think that everything we encounter or work on needs its own three-letter general acronym. I think everyone in some degree writes "ERP" or "MIS" software to run a business, but most places with an overabundance of acronyms are completely soul-crushing. I try to avoid those place and that kind of work.

The claim of support for interoperability or standards is common but a faithful implementation is pretty rare. It's a strategy publicized in leaked correspondence from Microsoft infamously termed therein "EEE: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" (look up the "Halloween Memos" for specifics).

EEE basically says that you start out by embracing and implementing a good standard for the task, you add some proprietary extensions, and before you know it you've extinguished the competitors.

Microsoft has combined that strategy with its monopoly position to the fullest.

You think Microsoft can't create a standards-compliant browser? They surely could if they wanted to, especially with open-source projects like Mozilla or WebKit floating around, whose code they could reference and incorporate (according to specific license stipulations, of course).

Microsoft keeps IE crippled because it's better business. If you force devs to pour special support into IE, which is the most widely used browser in the world, that's less time for anything else. The hope is that it will crowd out effort expended on ensuring compatibility with less dominant browsers like Mozilla or Chrome or whatever, thereby making it necessary that one use Internet Explorer to access the information he wants, thereby making it necessary that one obtain and use a copy of Microsoft Windows, which Microsoft sells for money. And so on.

It's important to remember that vendor lock-in is the holy grail for almost all software developers. They want you to enter your data into their supposedly "standards-compliant" programs so that when you go to export to the standard and encounter a "bug" you'll give up and keep the money in with them.

Lots of companies have no trepidation about this and don't even pretend. Both Apple and Microsoft utilize this often, and so does Google. They want you to make such a time, effort, and usage investment in their products that even if you wanted to use something else, the only way to do so would be to manually input endless gobs of data, something very few people have the patience or even the time to do.

So yeah, standards are usually a farce, probably particularly in the enterprise space.

cookiecaper

2nd EDIT: that was quite the pedantic post ("stupid people") but you subsequently recovered. I still chimed in, for what it's worth.

Yeah, I was really frustrated when I made that post, and I had no intention of returning, but I was invited back specifically by some members there asking for my input in the linked debate (there is another thread earlier which the linked thread rose from here).

It's not really part of my disposition to sugarcoat things. I try to maintain decorum but they had well destroyed that earlier on by their functionally illiteracy. It could have been nicely worded, but frankly I wanted the effect from that wording more, especially considering no one there can seem to bring themselves to read more than three consecutive words.

I have met a few good people from there, most of whom don't post very often any more. I have invited several of those over here, and I hope they come.

cookiecaper

The recap is essentially that some believe that plural celestial marriage is an eternal, celestial law which they will one day be called upon to receive as the fullness of the new and everlasting covenant if they are qualified. This groups sees it as a blessing because it makes us more like God.

The other group is disgusted by the concept of plural marriage insofar that they've admitted to physically retching at the thought. They don't seem to believe that plural marriage is ever going to make a comeback, they don't believe that the Lord would ever ask them to participate, and they seem to believe that the institution was a private test for the Saints asked to practice it and that though they admit some plural marriages will exist in the celestial world, they believe that it has no important place or significant in eternal law, and that those born in this day will receive all glory without ever having to participate in plural marriage at any point in eternity.

This group also believes that anyone preparing their hearts to receive a command to live in a plural marriage, anticipated by the first group as a day wherein they will be privileged to take part in full of the new and everlasting covenant, is violating temple covenants, breaking the heart of any current wife, and doing many other evil things. I try to tell them this is not so, but they can't read.

I am among the first group. I have serious doubts about the reading comprehension and open-mindedness of the others, because it seems that they've spent the entire thread randomly selecting and then reading only half of the words posted and making conclusions off of that. I have to literally quote old posts and bold the relevant parts before they'll admit that they issue they were harping wasn't what had been said in first place.

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