I 100% agree with the sentiment, but you can’t really compare not following religious rituals and what the religious consider murder. The existence of injustice is enough to mean something to someone. That’s how empathy works.

People get up in arms over the death penalty, and I don’t think it’s right to tell them that if they don’t like it, just don’t commit a capital crime or pay attention to scheduled executions.

The same for both Ukraine and Israel/Palestine, people are demonstrating and attempting to bring their beliefs to the government. The people who have true conversations about abortion see these as equivalent.

I don’t think they are blaming their religion for their voting in so much as outlining that their convictions that are informed by/in line with their religion (life begins at conception) makes abortion their largest single issue. Those of honest conviction see abortion as murder, and specifically murder of a baby, and that trumps the rest of the ticket. There are plenty of grifters and hypocrites on that side too, but I would hazard that the “silent majority” on the right are the sincere convictions type.

Can you really choose what you believe, though? Could you make yourself stop believing in gravity or anything else you truly believe in? Could you make yourself believe in flat earth if someone told you too? The mind isn’t something so malleable that you get to pick and choose your beliefs like a salad bar. Religious beliefs are one of the hardest to change, with even those leaving organized religion ending up frequently still believing in a God of some kind.

I grew up in a religious household but open minded and science oriented, so I deconverted and consider myself an atheist. I whole heartedly agree that the world would be a better place without religion, it’s the world’s greatest con job, but let’s not kid ourselves about the spectrum of the word choice here. It’s a (lesser) reverse of the religious telling anyone that isn’t heteronormative in any way that those are choices. It’s all brain chemistry occurring in a black box that we know vanishingly little about for how much we have studied it.

That is true of everything that isn’t barred by the fundamentals of physics, and disingenuous and you know it.

You can murder people, you can enslave others, Hindus can slaughter and eat cows, etc, you just don’t want to because it’s illegal.

For most religious people the tenents of their faith are core to their being and not something they just kinda like. Otherwise they tend to deconstruct from their religion after the inertia runs out. That’s why religion in the West is on a downward trajectory outside of Islam which is driven by immigration.

I fully support reproductive rights as much as the next guy, but let’s not pretend that the person outlined above single issue voting against abortion isn’t looking at the other side as otherwise great but you have to accept a few sanctioned murders. You would probably be single issue voting if we had a modern Aztec government that was close to a utopia but practiced human sacrifices to Quetzalcoatl because it maintains prosperity.

The scene was like an example reel from a video game, greenscale-ish translucent humanoid mannequin standing in a pseudo void, with a nondescript rectangular table of a similar greenscale-ish semi translucent material, and only the ball is “finished” as it is the camera focus. It is approximately between baseball and softball size, smooth, but I did not pay attention to the color. There is an “interaction/activation” sound effect as the mannequin kinda leans over and lightly pushed the ball to cause it to roll. It rolls to a stop on the table top, and this action loops.

The center of focus pulled back as I read the questions, more becoming aware of them than choosing them, and the scene changed with a camera pull out as part of the “ball is pushed” tutorial clip.

I have realized how much growing up as a gamer as influenced my perspective.

That depends. Yes, the cable standard did carry broadcast TV with commercials, but a big selling point in the beginning was also the existence of cable only paid TV channels that did not have commercials. Premium cable as an offshoot of cable only networks also did not have commercials, it was a major selling point. As the medium expanded and the channel breakdown shifted commercials came back in a big way, and even many premium channels got commercials. Prime examples would be USA Networks, HBO, Nickelodeon, and quite a few more.

I can agree with Archer on this one: brain aneurysms and saltwater crocodiles.

Cable TV started out as “pay for your access and you won’t get ads”. It enshitified into its current state, and streaming is literally a rerun. Give it a few more years and you will have price bundles for streaming services where you have to pay for peacock to get Disney. They might even bundle it with ISP services.

Even my local libertarian candidates have been hard right theocrats recently, like they failed to secure a promising outlook for a Republican run and just though libertarian was the same thing. A few are probably even too far right for the Republican ticket.

What part of “don’t tread on me” includes treading on bodily autonomy and LGBTQ rights? I am starting to think some people don’t actually have principles, and don’t understand words too good neither.

I hate how the theocratic right has successfully co-opted libertarian in the US to mean alt-republican.

Librewolf didn’t take as much adjustment as I would have expected, and it even supports toning down specific security postures for QoL niceties like Firefox account sync. Made the switch just to try it out and haven’t gone back. Excited to see what people come up with for more forks/hard forks in the future.

Just tried out Libation for the first time this week, very happy so far. Further testing of results is still required, but this was an excellent suggestion.

Finally got around to backing up my over 200 audiobooks in a DRM-free format after this post reminded me it was on my to-do list. Libation is pretty damn good.

You should if you want to be a science writer or academic, which lets be honest is a better comparison here. If your job involves latin for names and descriptions then you probably should take at least a year or two of latin if you don’t want to make mistakes here and there out of ignorance.

Everything is an arbitrary division when we get down to it. Doing away with states would require a complete rewrite of the constitution, and a fundamental shift to the country as a whole. I personally like the Republic concept and ability for states to experiment with things that might not be popular or a priority for the entire country. This will have good and bad outcomes on these experiments, but it’s how we have things like decriminalization, universal healthcare attempts, etc. Without the “all other things not innumerated belong to the states” this isn’t possible, and removing state representation removes that.

Depending on your forecasted capacity needs, Ubiquity does have some attractive options depending on your comfort with managed vs unmanaged switches is. I am making some assumptions based on homelab tendencies. I have been very happy with the UniFi ecosystem personally, though I know it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. The Dream Machine Pro has been very good for me both operationally and reliability wise, and there are expansion options for 10Gb Ethernet or SFP+ switches that cover most (pro/prosumer) price ranges.

They are definitely not the best bang for buck necessarily, and I have not tried any MikroTik alternatives to directly compare so take my opinions with a big grain of salt. I work in a purely Cisco environment and am used to working almost exclusively in CLI, but I found the UniFi GUI and environment easy enough to pick up with a little effort. UniFi firewall is too permissive by default if you are using something like the Dream Machine as the front end, but as a Boundary non-expert it was not too difficult to configure satisfactorily. Wireless APs are pretty great too.

I can’t help but read the ph as an f, even though it is clearly a concatenation.

And there you go from the moral/intellectual high ground, mocking them as toddlers and saying it’s right and normal to laugh and make fun of them.

I can’t stand vaccine hesitancy and anti-science bullshit. I’ve had to deal with this becoming a Fox News thing in my own family, and lost too many people from alternative “Eastern” medicine over “Western” medical science. But the mockery and ridicule only feeds into the Christian persecution complex most of that rural white population already embraces, and causes the wagons to circle.

January 6th is not seen as an insurrection but as citizens banding together to protect democracy. Collusion with Russia was always seen as a false attempt to make him look bad, especially with things like the dossier being faked. Tax evasion is considered smart if you can do it legally, and the New York prosecution for what the industry considers standard practice reinforced the perspective that it was weaponizing the justice system. Autographed bibles are no more sacrilegious than any of the megachurch/televangelist who buys a private jet because God wants him to to.

Each one of those hurtles may take someone out of his camp, but for some that will only be if there is a viable alternative. Keep in mind that the alternative on the democratic side is trying to end their 2nd amendment rights, open the borders to secure a permanent underclass voting block, and lose the national protection of God by persecuting Christians. It doesn’t matter to what degree any of that is true, that is the hurtle they have to clear.

Since armed service is venerated more on the right than the left, and has higher percentages of veterans and their children, this might indeed be the straw that breaks the camel’s back for some or many. He is grifting in so many areas, that if he is also shown to be a grifter on respecting the armed services in addition to being a false Christian and 1 percenter elite then parts of his base might see him as no better than the Democrats.

If there was credibility for a Jewish ethnostate 70 years ago due to the Holocaust and global antisemitism, how do we get to say things are better now and take the country back. Especially with all the other ethnostates in the world.

Obviously there is a problem because the region had changed hands over the past 1-2000 years and had other ethnic groups when the country was established by the Allies. The idea of having taken the land from Germany instead of the area around l Jerusalem sounds like poetic justice, but ignores that they have a historic homeland. Anyone would want their historic homeland with their historic religious sites back over somewhere else.

It seems like Jews are treated as second class when it comes to that. Talk of giving Mt Rushmore back is because it was that tribes sacred religious site, and no one would be happy giving them another mountain in another state.