A lot of the bible that gets followed by mega churches follows the doctrine of Paul who never met Jesus and was a power hungry bastard who claimed to have hallucinated Jesus after he got hit on the head with a rock.

The idea of salvation through Jesus being through faith and not actions, throwing money at churches, treating any sex for pleasure as an apex sin comes from him.

Effectively these are not Christians but Paulians.

There is evidence of a number of uses of vernacular written language in archeological sites. The matter of literacy as mentioned around the advent of the Doomsday Book was not a measure of who could read common vernacular they way literate tends to mean today. It was a measure of who had completed their letters. A set form of schooling that covered about six years worth of language education and numeracy. So it’s kind of hard to track actual literacy rates given sources at the time because the bar to count as “literate” by census records was specific. The majority of college level modern users of language would be unable to clear that bar. I would not be considered literate because I can only write vernacular. So you are semi-correct in that sense yes only nobles and men of the church were “literate” by standards of the time.

There are a number of archeological finds throughout the medieval ages that showed a general upward trend of the skill of being able to read and write fairly basic missives amongst humble people. A lot of our surviving evidence of peasant writing is on very rudimentary materials like bark and it is very practical use. People learned the skill from other people for doing stuff like writing IOUs or orders for goods or as reminders and most examples that survived were under 20 words in length. In a lot of places being able to read and write wasn’t considered remarkable enough to record as a special skill unless you could do it in Latin. This is why you find books written for common people like the Dite de Hosebondrie ( Husbandry) for the peasant farmer or guides for common housewives in the 13th century in “rustic” language styles. Books were uncommon and expensive and you had to go to them to read them but the people who they were written for weren’t always nobles or clergy.

https://www.medievalists.net/2024/11/medieval-daily-life-on-birchbark/

Not quite true that nobles and priests were the only ones that knew how to read. Lower classes absolutely knew how to read they just didn’t use that knowledge for writing books - they used it for communicating and for legal purposes. The lower classes were actually quite litigious and a subsect of them required literacy as a means of self advocacy, occasional resistance and survival.

The concept of the peasantry being unschooled, idiot commons without the brains and means to aquire knowledge has always been a way to keep you and I, people who came after as their legacy, distanced from their history so we could instead align ourselves with the rich and powerful who could be seen as the “creators” of society and culture.

Those peasants and serfs were a lot more like us than people think.

Looking at humans from a capitalist standpoint, since we are living in a highly mechanized and optimized labor society there will always be a surplus of labour. Not everyone needs to work and over time less and less people will need to work to sustain the whole. Defining humans as worthy to live or not based on their capacity to work means you accept some humans as surplus, fungible and ultimately liquidatable because the system has no use for them even if they are healthy and ablebodied.

This is not how you treat people. This is how you appraise livestock.

If you have ever attempted to change your name you know it is way more annoying to change your name than accept someone else’s change of name. The amount of admin it takes to make that update in your social circle even before you try and make it legal is a test of social fortitude and willpower.

Remember when someone is changing their name they are very aware of the imposition of the mental load they are placing on you. Grace goes a long way.

Because that would require either a terrorist action or a bunch of Internationally illegal tampering with American Democracy or declaring war against the World power with the the largest standing army and deepest pockets for arsonal. The rest of the world is effectively held hostage while Americans solve their own problems.

It’s the reason why a lot of bad people in power stay in power. There can be tariffs and sanctions and all manner or soft power deals but the rules are rules. Sovereignty and a right to run your country mostly the way you want is protected as a right and and the US used its positioning as the least devastated megapower/millitary supremacy post WWII to basically bend the world over and get a lot of acceptions to a lot of rules.

In the case of JKR that talking point kind of sailed on. Nobody really cares if you enjoy something second hand or where the money and interest played out years ago. The books, the old movies, the merch you picked up at a garage sale…

Problem is when you support the latest and greatest newly licenced thing that lines her pockets with cash because she is USING that cash to do direct damage to the community. She’s been financially backing anti-trans groups and lobbying in the UK. Just ONE of her little go fund mes was chipping in a 700,000"£ donation to the lawyers who got gender recognition certificates made worthless in the UK Supreme Court. Ticket sales to events, merch deals, video game titles, remakes… It propells demand which means a nice big chunk of that coin passes right through her pockets and right into directly funding her hate and her fans go on to brigade trans support spaces which often are necessary emergency mental health support for weeks after a big release online. More than one suicide can be laid at the feet of these mobs.

The difference between that and Kevin Spacey is at least he’s moldering quietly.