I'll save y'all from having to read about this villain. He's not referring to actual ethnicity. He wants an "ethnic" cleansing of liberals from San Francisco, he wants to start a new gang called The Greys, and he wants the city controlled by corporate gangs who can do whatever they want. He wants to bribe police officers to do his bidding, and equip them with special uniforms to demonstrate their loyalty. He wants to reintroduce segregation, but for political alignment, and ban liberals (who he calls The Blues) from access to good parts of the city. He's dangerous because he has resources and a captive audience. I'm sure he is on several government watchlists already, as he should be.
All this facial recognition technology that is popping up as breaking news was on demonstration in the Microsoft visitor center 10 fricken years ago. Over a decade ago they could already assign an ID to a person the first time they were seen, accurately estimate their height, weight, ethnicity, age, and even mood, and create a persistent profile for them across locations. That was a decade ago when they had it on display for visitors, so it had actually been available for much longer. Imagine what they're doing now.
My favorite part is that his nom de plume, General Yossi Sariel’s alias, while working a book about AI in the Israeli security services, was “Brigadier General YS.”
"The app boasts influential supporters, including the former leader of the Southern Baptist Convention, Jim Henry, and controversial Christian data-harvesting firm Gloo. It puts a lot of features at the fingertips of the faithful, including the ability to filter whole neighborhoods by religion, ethnicity, “Hispanic country of origin,” “assimilation,” and whether there are children living in the household."
Oh please let them come, I'll gladly tell them all about how "Jehovah, or JHVH-1 as WE know him, is no true god but an evil space monster from some corporate sin galaxy sent here to take our SLACK! He's been fooling them! But J. R. "Bob" Dobbs, High Epopt of The Church of The SubGenius, knows the truth, and he has a plan to save all his followers from certain death come X-Day. We'll all be Ruptured up into the PleasureSaucers for orgies with the alien sex goddesses and the MWOWM machine will make our every possible desires true. You want that lost comic collection back? Want revenge on that one priest? Well "Bob" will give it to ya, young evangelist, here, take this pamphlet to get you started..."
These lunatics have a disturbing amount of control in the US government.
Laughing at them might be fun, and I was doing it until recently, but they’re not joking. The worse our climate disasters become – and they will very soon – the more scared people will become, and the more these groups will take advantage of that fear. We’ll see more climate refugees, more desperation, and more fear. These groups prey on fear, and they’ll amplify it on purpose.
True fascism thrives on fear, which is why these people amplify it like they do. When climate disasters accelerate, these groups will harness the social upheaval to take control. I don’t know what we can do to stop it, but we should all be thinking about and sharing ways to head it off, because they’ve got plans in place already.
I know I sound paranoid, but I’ve been watching them and these aren’t my ideas, but theirs. They talk about this a lot, and if we aren’t prepared, their plans could actually work. I don’t want to live in the fascist future they’re planning. If we don’t combat it, we’ll be living in the Handmaid’s Tale before most of us realise.
Can we appreciate how incredibility messed up it is to have Christians trying to tell other religions are not valid? It is terribly messed up to try to convert Muslims to Christianity.
With that being said it is important to note that this is a small group of people in Christianity. They are ruining the reputation for all denominations and creating Christian hate which will hurt Christians everywhere in the long run. I wonder how they would react if there was Jewish protest in front of there Church
Exactly. They're always whining about being persecuted when they aren't, and don't seem to grasp the fact that doing this kind of shit is what will get them persecuted.
I think the "try to convert" part makes no sense. Conversion is a very personal thing, and you can't force someone to do it. You can invite, but that's about it.
I don't think the app is designed to try to convert people. Filtering by immigration status is the giveaway.
Oftentimes, American-style authoritarian organized religion equips you with a very particular type of doublethink which makes it possible to promote an app like this and wholeheartedly believe that it will be used for good things because you and all the people around you are the best type of people that exist, while being aware and planning for it to maybe be used (and making sure it's useful) for something totally different.
"Trying to convert" has biblical basis, and most religions have some kind of evangelism component to it. But there's a lot of ways to go about that. One is the aggressive approach (i.e. high pressure salesman; join or you'll burn in hell!), and the other is the example Jesus and other scriptural people set (i.e. serving others and getting them to want to ask the questions). Many religious people to the latter, and it's the obnoxious people who do the former that give religion a bad rap.
So my recommendation is if you want people to join your church, instruct your members to go out and do good in the community. Be a good friend, offer to do service for them from time to time, and engage with service opportunities in your community. Eventually people will ask, and they'll care a lot more about what you have to say than if you're telling them to go to church or they'll burn in hell...
Someone on lemmy commented that the purpose of those conversion drives is not to garner new members (though it's a nice benefit if it works), but to help reinforce the "us" versus "them" division in the people out knocking on doors. It really makes a lot of sense to me.
I agree with that. I think the point of Mormons being forced to go door-to-door and engage with the outside world in a way that is guaranteed to create discomfort and hostility... is that they'll learn the the outside world equals discomfort and hostility. I can't imagine that it has any nonzero effect in terms of converting people to Mormonism at all.
I think how it works for Christians probably depends on the nonuniform details of how exactly they do the proselytizing, but I'm imagine it works mostly the same in most cases.
Picking them out in particular is interesting, because I have a good friend that's Mormon, and we used to hang out a lot. They really have their own community, I was definitely an outsider (but not obviously so, as I don't have facial hair, etc.). We briefly dated, but that didn't go anywhere for obvious reasons, and later I realized that in her world I'm probably the "bad boy" (few others would consider me that, but everything is relative).
They were nice people, but overall they just were ...boring. I don't even remember most of the ones I met, and I doubt I could pick even some of her closer friends out of a lineup. I don't mean to be nasty, but few of them had any sort of interesting life experiences, which is weird, considering many of them traveled abroad for mission trips.
At one point the Mormon single women in the area created a video to convince more single Mormon men to move there. There was a serious shortage. Even in that situation they still felt like they had to stay in the Mormon community.
On the flip side, a few years ago, friends of ours moved to a new neighborhood and had a housewarming party, and one of the families that joined them were neighbors that were Mormons (who preferred the term Latter Day Saints). But the wife had rainbow rings on and I think one of the daughters had purple hair...so, they seemed unlike other Mormons I've met, but I didn't get the chance to ask about it.
Mormons aren't forced to go door-to-door, it's absolutely a choice. In fact, Mormon missionaries pay their own way (less so in poorer countries, but still).
Perhaps you're thinking of Jehova's Witnesses? I don't know much about their proselytizing, but I have invited them in before and they don't seem particularly interested in following up, especially if you don't buy their stuff.
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