Here is an easy way to tell: If someone wears a cross, that isn’t a strong indication of faith. If a cross wears them, that’s a pretty strong indication of faith.

The Weddell Sea, north of Antarctica, brought to you by the department of redundancy department.

Absolutely. What I’m saying is that all couples can apply for the same legal contract, call it a civil partnership license, civil union, joint household contract or something to that extent. Marriage licenses no longer exist.

I’m actually opposed to all state recognized marriages in the Unites States. I believe it violates the separation of church and state clause of the 1st Amendment. This is the same reason that people who (genuinely) oppose gay marriage oppose it.

If adult couples want to enter a legal contract joining their assets and income, then that should be available to everyone regardless of gender or sexual orientation, but that should also be separate from the religious covenant of marriage and associated ceremonies performed in a church.

So I’m opposed to state recognized gay marriage, but I’m also opposed to state recognized heterosexual marriages for the same reason.

Ya, maybe bills shouldn’t be 1000+ pages so that people can actually know what is in them.

This is a concept that somehow software developers seem to grasp, but lawmakers don’t?

Try submitting a pull request with 100,000 lines of code to the Linux kernel, or any other serious project. Nobody is going to review and accept it because that is a rediculous amount of code to change with a single PR. How much more important is a federal law than a software project? Yet one will have maintainers pour over it line by line while the other the “maintainers” don’t even read.

I would say that before you can become a Christian you first have to realize that you aren’t a good person, but if you call yourself a Christian and say you are a good person, you are neither.

“Here is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance: Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am the worst.” — 1 Timothy 1:15, NIV

I guess I didn’t communicate my point effectively. I wasn’t trying to nitpick semantics. I was trying to say that people don’t think critically because they assume impartiality.

If the first thing people did when they looked at a study was to ask what possible biases or conflicts of interest the sponsors have, then conducting a meta-study concluding that biased studies are biased wouldn’t be news to anyone.

There is no such thing as an impartial sponsor; some are more obviously biased than others, but the belief in a fictitious impartiality is part of the problem. It shouldn’t take a meta-study for people to see am obvious conflict of interest.

I’m biased. You are biased. Everyone is biased.

Is it really screwing up the education system, or is it just revealing how screwed up it already was?

I feel like he is getting a bad rap here. I mean, he had a gender change to convincingly play female characters in Juno, Inception, and Hard Candy, among others.

Talk about a method actor, let’s see Christain Bale do that…

I’m curious, do the same people who think that the moon landing was faked also believe that Voyager is fake? Because to me, Voyager is more impressive at this point.

Voting to make cuts to an already ailing ATC system makes no sense to me. Simply from a self-preservation aspect, I would think this is one service that all politicians and oligarchs would maintain. It doesn’t matter if you fly private or commercial, everyone uses and needs ATC to fly safely.

At least with something like global warming/climate change, I can see people selfishly believing it won’t effect them during their lifetime, but the 2nd and 3rd order effects of removing ATC can be immediate and fatal.

I only hope that a minimum number of bystanders are killed when poetic justice occurs.

I am not arguing with the obvious corruption, but to provide a counterpoint to the second part of the argument: if we aren’t allowed to make peace with former terrorists, then we can never stop fighting each other, and if we keep fighting each other, then we will keep creating the next generation of terrorists.

I was thinking more like:

I say please and thank you when writing to LLMs, not because I think they care or will remember or to anthropomorphize them, but because I don’t want to develop bad habits. I don’t want all my writing and conversations with actual humans to become curt and transactional because I forget that they are human and talk to them like an LLM.

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It may outlast the entire country. Considering it was founded 140 years before the U.S., that wouldn’t be entirely surprising.

I can hardly believe that we have devolved so far, so quickly. We are literally one step away from becoming an authoritarian dictatorship. The plan is this:

1. Deport (and by deport, they mean imprison for life) immigrants. These immigrants will mostly be legitimately illegal and gang associated criminals, but there will be a few individuals with legal standing and no criminal records. This could simply be the result of denying due process, or it could be an intentional test. The important factor is that 5th Amendment Due process rights are denied to all of them. The fact that these people (but be sure to de-humanize them as much as possible) are immigrants will be the distracting factor. <---- We are here

2. Deport (and by deport, they mean imprison for life) criminals. These will be legitimate criminals with legitimately horrible records; that will be the distracting issue that will be made the focus of the argument: “They are serial killers, rapists, pedophiles, we don’t want them here, so we should get rid of them.” This has already been announced as the plan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUfrwWz-m5I . That is not the point! The point is that they are still U.S. citizens, despite their crimes. The significance of this is that it will be the final barrier that needs to be broken, and the final protection that must be dismantled for the final solution to be enacted. If no one steps up and successfully defends the constitutional rights of these American citizens, then all the pieces will be in place for step 3.

3. Deport (and by deport, they mean imprison for life) political dissidents, rivals, business opponents, and maybe just anyone the administration doesn’t like. If they are political dissidents they will claim that they have committed crimes like, “hate speech against America™”, if they are a minority, they will be “associated with gangs”, if they are business rivals it will have committed “economic terrorism”, or something like that. It doesn’t really matter because they eliminated due process in step 1 (remember that was the important factor, not the immigrant dis-tractor), and without due process they don’t have to prove any crimes. Our last defense would have been the simple fact that we are American Citizens, but we established that doesn’t matter in step 2 because they were “bad people”, but now the “bad people” are whoever the administration decides is bad.

The context of the 5th amendment is important to understand its intent:

Historically, the Fifth Amendment draws significant influence from English common law. The grand jury clause specifically dates back to the Magna Carta, and was designed to protect accused persons from prosecution by the English royalty. In keeping with that intention, the Constitution’s framers opted to adapt the grand jury to the Constitution, so as to protect citizens from prosecution by the federal government.
Reagan Library

Even in a Monarchy, which is not the form of government we are supposed to have, the Magna Carta offered protections against the King from prosecuting commoners, which is the origin of this amendment. We aren’t just devolving to pre-revolution America, which had enough disagreements with the rule of King George III that it sparked a war…no we are devolving to a pre-Magna Carta England type of Government. We are descending into middle-age feudalism with complete authoritarian rule… and we aren’t fortunate enough to have a dictator like Alfred the Great.

The U.S. Military has also spent multiple decades teaching decentralized command as a doctrinal philosophy. It is very much not organized to be controlled by top-down dictatorship.

Source: https://youtu.be/1162ouPHH3Q