I think she’s partly right, but also, if she was the one who ultimately succeeded in getting Biden to drop out when he did, then isn’t it reasonable to expect that he would have dropped out earlier if she had pushed him out earlier? Which would make it her fault. Fuck, I don’t even know anymore. I don’t have a lot of confidence that the Democratic party will learn the right lessons from this loss.

I appreciate the question, and like many Jews I love questions like this. It is never hateful to be curious.

Like many/most identities, being Jewish doesn’t mean just one thing to everyone. First and foremost, Judaism is a religion that is passed down through the matriarchal side of the family. So if your mother is Jewish, you’re Jewish. You’re Jewish particularly to other Jews in this instance, even if you don’t necessarily consider yourself Jewish.

Judaism is not a race, full stop. Just like Christianity is not a race. There are white Jews, black Jews, Latino Jews, South Asian Jews, East Asian Jews etc. There aren’t a lot of us as a whole, but we do exist in most racial groups. But Judaism is often correctly linked to ethnicity, which is a set of shared traditions, culture, language, and norms.

There is a huuuuge range of ‘orthodoxy’ under the umbrella of Judaism. Different ‘sects’ holds fundamentally similar values (for example: you won’t find very many anti-abortion Jews), but people inside these different groups will observe their traditions at differently levels/extremes or not at all. Most Jews in America don’t keep Kosher, for example, but most Orthodox Jews do.

Judaism also has a rich tradition of questioning everything (which is why we usually love these kinds of questions). It is not considered heresy to question beliefs or authority, in fact it’s usually encouraged. You’ll find many Jews who openly identify as atheists, and yet most still fully consider themselves to be Jewish. This usually doesn’t bother anyone, Rabbis included. Atheists even hold a place of honor in some Jewish communities, because atheists get their morality from their own values or other people, not from a fear of god or some external force. This is part of why it is pretty common to find Jews (observant or not) who consider themselves atheist.

All of that is to say you don’t necessarily need to believe in god to be considered Jewish.

Atheist Jew here. They really hate me.

Having a device that can be used for surveillance is not the same thing as someone actively choosing to report their neighbor.

Been having similar thoughts. We’ll very soon be back in the age of internment camps, reporting on neighbors’ behavior, and minorities looking over their shoulders even more than usual. I am ashamed of us.

I actually don’t think there’s any uncertainty. He’s been quite clear about what he’ll do. He’ll kill all federal cases and ongoing federal investigations, pardon himself for everything he can pardon himself for, and all of the state proceedings will be paused until after his term. In the meantime he’ll “investigate,” threaten, and bully anyone involved in the various state cases, and given his age it is incredibly unlikely that legal proceedings will ever result in justice for his myriad crimes.

This is exactly the kind of crap I’m talking about. You are literally the first and only person who has ever called me right wing, because I objectively and genuinely hold far left beliefs, and I always have. You don’t know me, and since you obviously don’t want to engage in a good faith conversation, your trolling means nothing to me.

Thanks! I was afraid you were going to say that…but it makes sense. Think I’ll go for it. Also means I can wait a while to buy Veilguard while I play Inquisition.

I’ve been needing a new big game to sink my teeth into, but I haven’t played any of the other Dragon Age games. I watched the glowing euro gamer review for Veilguard and it looks amazing to me (the slightly stylized look doesn’t bother me at all). Do you think I’ll enjoy it without much context? I don’t usually buy full-priced, but I make the occasional exception for games I know I’ll play for a while…Baldurs Gate, for example.

I didn’t see what you were responding to, but I’m very close to doing this. Yesterday I unsubbed from just about all the .ml communities I was subbed to. They’re impossible to talk to and have gotten incredibly nasty. They just start indignantly name-calling immediately, there’s no real engagement anymore. I consider myself to be extremely left wing, but I also live in the real world. They are insufferable.

Terry Pratchett was one of a kind.

lol ain’t the justice system grand?

I know you’re being cute, but for those who don’t know the whole story: after the jury found him civilly liable, the judge made a point of publicly clarifying that yes, he was found to have raped Carroll.

One source

Another source

Not only that, but Trump was found by a jury to have raped E Jean Carrol. Reminder: we already know Trump is a rapist.

As much as I’m not a fan of this guy’s belief system, he has been speaking out against Trump for years now, this is just his latest.

There aren’t a lot of conservative judges like this guy left. He testified in front of the January 6 Committee, so Trump lost him a while ago, but his testimony and subsequent public interviews are master classes in what it means to put the country before partisanship. I strongly disagree with his judicial philosophy and his conservatism, and find a lot of his views to be antiquated and part of the problem, but he stood up and spoke out when others didn’t. That should still mean something for a judge, who rarely go public like this.

This. They’re surprisingly energy efficient, and while they take a bit to heat up, once they get going they really radiate. I have a small one, and it gets me through the coldest days of winter without needing to turn on the built-in heaters in my apartment.

Bonus is that my cat loooves it. He posts up right next to it and is in cozy heaven.

In my experience, it’s less about the job and more about the personal preferences of the agent running the background investigation. I’ve seen contractors for low-level non-sensitive positions have entire job offers rescinded because they were honest about past weed use earlier in their life (not current). I’ve seen contractors breeze through the same process while flat out lying about their past weed use, and I’ve been told that lying is typically the best option, because the agents don’t have the time or resources to follow up. But if you’re caught lying on a form you’re fucked, so it’s a mix of damned if you do damned if you don’t, but also you might be totally fine depending on how the agent feels that day. On top of that, many of the agents are contractors themselves, so there’s very little incentive for consistency.

I’m not sure if communicating with felons would/should revoke whatever clearances they have, but you’ve still hit on a really important point: these men run companies that have billions of dollars worth of federal contracts, and if they were anybody else they never would have passed the required background investigation in the first place. For those who don’t know, federal contractors work on behalf of the US Government, and every single one of them has to pass a thorough background investigation in order to be cleared to work on a federal contract. Yes, even the cafeteria workers who run the food court in a federal building. Musk has smoked weed in public on camera, and while I couldn’t care less about that, anyone completing the federal background investigation form in good faith would have to report that, and it would automatically disqualify them from any kind of security clearance. If they didn’t report it, then that means they lied on an official form, which at the very least would disqualify them, and at worst is another felony.

There are two sets of rules, one for the billionaires and one for the rest of us. They can happily break all the laws that would get the rest of us thrown in prison, and what’s more, they can further enrich themselves through that unlawful behavior.

Wow, this is some serious chutzpah:

“Every day, somewhere, some Amazon executive or Blue Origin executive or someone from the other philanthropies and companies I own or invest in is meeting with government officials,” Bezos wrote. “You can see my wealth and business interests as a bulwark against intimidation, or you can see them as a web of conflicting interests. Only my own principles can tip the balance from one to the other.”

Firstly, Trump is not a government official. He’s a private citizen, who is also a convicted felon and adjudicated rapist.

Secondly, don’t tell us that your principles are the only thing standing in the way of your corrupt conflicting business interests, without telling us what your principles are. Oh right, we can plainly see that you have no principles from your actions over decades of running an exploitative monopoly, and from the fact that you hijacked your own newspaper’s editorial page to tell us that ‘no no it’s still a legit newspaper I swear’ as you undermine its credibility with your own words.

What a disgrace.