Antichrists are popping up everywhere

[Labster]

I'd like to share a little news story.  It's fairly long, but I'm just going to say that I was laughing for about ten minutes straight as I read through this story:  Inside tech billionaire Peter Thiel’s off-the-record lectures about the antichrist

You know how having money makes people think that they're really smart in every field?  Well, someone managed to get a recording of Peter Thiel's four-part lecture series, despite making it clear that recordings were entirely prohibited.  And this guy hates universities so much that he just spent a few hours trying to impress academics with his theories about the antichrist.

What is the antichrist?  Apparently anything to do with world government, like UNICEF or something. And also getting in the way of new technology, like luddites. Who is the antichrist?  People like Marc Andressen, Greta Thunberg, and Eliezer Yudkowsky get mentioned as candidates, fairly close together. (A different article noted: "With enemies like these, who needs friends?")  The whole thing is like SF tech scene inside baseball, but antichrist flavored.

And people kept going to see these things!  I mean, I definitely would have, this is comedy gold, especially if you're in technology.

I'm not really knocking the idea of there being antichrists, there are plenty of people who meet the definition in 1 John. It's that, like, people whom you disagree with in politics are probably not the antichrist just because you disagree with them, right?

[Dartz]

And here I thought the whole point of the Antichrist is you would not recognise the antichrist.

The antichrist is likely to be the one trying their hardest to convince the world they are not the antichrist.

Given that Jesus was executed for bucking against the conventional power structures of the day, and that all his initial followers live in communse with communal property - and there were rules for kicking people out who lied about owning a lot of property - I think, the exact opposite of that would be a good place to start.

I think the original antichrist was supposed to be Nero or something, but somewhere the whole 'Get the romans out of palestine' was forgotten - probably about the time the Christian church became the church of Rome and became the tool of the powerful to enforce their power structures instead.

[Labster]

It looks like the earliest definition of antichrist that you get from John is essentially the obvious one: an antichrist is a person who denies that Jesus is the Christ.  Like an anticommunist is a person who denies that Marx has the right economic system.  It's just an opponent on an important issue.  It appears that the specific antichrists he was talking about at the beginning were Gnostics, a good portion of whom were saying stuff like "Jesus got the secret knowledge, and you can be exactly like him too if you know these mysteries" which is de facto denying that Jesus was special, the divine son of God.

The comparisons to Nero follow pretty closely from that -- not only does he deny the Christ, but has his own claim of divinity, which pretty obviously makes him an "alternative Christ" candidate.  So once the empire adopts Christianity, it's pretty clearly not having antichrist(ian) leadership. There really isn't much difference between antichrist and being anti-Christian. I think that we've gotten this whole concept of an Antichrist that is secret and big is all essentially an anti-Christian plot to make us see enemies, where we should be seeing neighbors and brothers who we should love.

It's really easy to spot an antichrist, then.  They're the people, when someone says to love the enemy, goes out and tells them that it's better to hate the enemy instead. There's no need for complicated theories when you can just look for people speaking against the commandment to love neighbors as themselves. Denying Jesus's main commandment is more or less equivalent to saying that Jesus was not anointed to issue that commandment.

[Labster]

Jeff Bezos Says He Doesn't Understand Why Anybody Alive Now Would Be 'Discouraged'—Because Soon, 'Millions Of People Will Be Living In Space'

I'm starting to have the suspicion that billionaires are somewhat untethered from reality.

[classicdrogn]

Well, surely if someone's net worth is high enough they can count all their chattel vassals employees as well? /s

[Labster]

Man, I knew my former company was going downhill when I heard the CEO talking about "human capital". Note that capital, chattel, and cattle are all highly related words, from Latin caput, meaning "head". If your business is talking about decreasing headcount, well they're already talking about you in the same way a rancher talks about a few head of steers.

That said with AI coming, I'm really hoping for the sexaroid boomers in space. And then he really will own them. Of all science fiction, somehow, BGC is still on track for 2040.