Read Fewer Books

The article also appears to be conflating the number of books owned (or more precisely, being depicted as owning) with the number of books read, which is supremely, jaw-droppingly dumb:

> We can pick up the minimalist attitude to reading in early visual depictions of one of the heroes of Christian scholarship, St Jerome – who was by all accounts the supreme intellect of Christendom, who translated the Greek and Hebrew portions of the Bible into Latin, wrote a large number of commentaries on scripture and is now the patron saint of libraries and librarians. But despite all his scholarly efforts, when it came to showing where and how St Jerome worked, a detail stands out: there are almost no books in his famous study. Strikingly, the most intelligent and thoughtful intellectual of the early church seems to have read fewer things than an average modern eight year old. To follow the depiction by Antonello da Messina, St Jerome appears to be the proud owner of about ten books in all!

How am I supposed to read this but as a claim that Jerome wrote more books than he read, based on a painting made a millennium after his death?

Goodreads was originally a "subtle funnel to drive sales of books", as any book listing there offered links to buy it through various online retailers, and Goodreads got a cut of those sales as the referrer. However, since most people were buying through Amazon (which had already succeeded in marginalizing its competition), Amazon was paying Goodreads a fortune each month in referral fees. In the end, Amazon felt it was cheaper just to buy Goodreads out entirely than maintain the status quo.

This is only true if you define the "Religion" out of religion; that is, shear it of any dogma or faith claims or even the "funny hats social club" cultural aspect, and then say that all of the remaining guidance is the religion. This isn't what religion means to most people, regardless of whether they have one or not.

I can't really see why this is bad, which is kind of what we're talking about. I can see why full-frontal nudity is a tactical error in some contexts, in that you shouldn't do it because you'll end up in a worse position if you do, but I really don't get the apparent moral revulsion some people have regarding the naked human form.

This is part of what we're talking about because it signals that the traditionalists can't impose their revulsion on the rest of us. The recent successes of the Queer Rights movement also prove this: Same-sex marriage has gone from unthinkable to unremarkable. So has transitioning. The people who are most opposed to those things were utterly incapable of making cogent arguments sufficient to sway the societies in which they lived, so now they're widely accepted.

> Growing up I had a mathematics teacher that told me that if companies could get away with it, they would just show real murders all day on the TV.

No. Most people don't want to see that. Most people have a serious aversion to seeing real death and gore and so on, and it isn't feigned "virtue signalling" or similar.

> I don't think anyone here is arguing for gender or racial inequality.

Except the arguments against, say, nudity on TV come down to "I don't like it, so it's immoral" and that exact same argument has been used to argue against social equality of all kinds.