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.

It sucks having the libertarian party co-opted, the last 4 years the libertarian candidates have been even more Christo-fascist than the Republicans. Happened to the sane average Republicans, and the left wing Democrats as well. Everything is coming up Corpo-kleptocracy.

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

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.

The only ones I can think of off the top of my head are:

1. that borders do actually matter to the sovereignty of a country and that control over who and what crosses that border is a necessity,

2. countries need some kind of balanced budget to prevent hyperinflation and inevitable austerity,

3. the constitution should be protected and enforced equally for all amendments unless and until they are further amended or repealed, and

4. the Federal government should exist to provide for the defense of the country, protection of interstate and international commerce, and protection of the common good.

I happen to personally think that the best implementation for these points would be:

1. an overhaul of immigration policy is needed to increase legal immigration and decrease the time spent in that process to months or at least under 1-2 years with a pathway that allows current illegal immigrants to get in the back of that (actually useful and reasonably short) line,

2. countries cannot balance a budget like a household balances a checkbook because it doesn’t work like that and anyone who says otherwise is either economic-illiterate or a con artist,

3. First, Second, Fourth, and Fifth amendments especially all need to be equally enforced and double especially on the police and the State (looking at you Civil Asset Forfiture, and your partner in crime Cash Bail), and

4. all of these functions would be best served with Universal Healthcare, Universal Education to an undergrad (Associates) level, Universal Basic Income replacing the existing welfare framework with no hoops or requirements or means testing, some form of Georgist land tax integration to help ensure the wealthy at least start to pay their fair share, and a heavy dose of monopoly busting and anti-trust enforcement to prevent billionaires from becoming a thing in the first place and prevent regulatory capture by capital at the very least.

Also religion has no business in government and fuck off with race/orientation/religious/etc discrimination. It is all class warfare from the elite and Reagan deregulation caused the death of the economy and the middle class.

This is why I consider myself a centrist, because the Right would have a conniption fit at most of those beliefs. The Left would have the same conniption fit that I also think that current border policies, the existence of sanctuary cities/states providing incentive, and worst of all the companies and people hiring and exploiting illegal labor due to insufficient availability, use, and enforcement of tools like e-verify (AKA the current status quo) is a shit show and the “left” shows too much weakness on this topic, I think the “open borders/a person cannot be illegal” crowd are dangerously misguided utopiasts, I support the personal right to keep and bear arms interpretation of 2A, support (not limited but also limited) Sates rights as useful ways to experiment with policy along with the original intention of the Senate and Electoral College, and think a decent amount of Left/Democrat ideology is unrealistic, counterproductive, or worse.

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.

Universal healthcare, universal education to a collegiate level, and UBI replacing most/all welfare results in much less government interference/involvement and results in the greatest individual freedom via geographical/socioeconomic/employment mobility.

It’s also not incompatible with capitalism, and in fact the increased mobility will spur more entrepreneurialism.

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.

I have never heard someone call all of recorded human history relatively recent outside of paleontologists or geologists.