If you have problems with religions as a whole, I think that’s fine. But why is Islam specifically not compatible with western society but Christianity is? Islam isn’t monolithic in the same way Christianity isn’t monolithic. I’m sure you could cherry pick things from the Quran that are dangerous and scary. I could do the same thing with the Bible. Not all Christians follow the Bible strictly as written. The same is true of Muslims and the Quran. Do you think Christian values are aligned with what leftists fight for? Do you believe we should remove Christians from the country for having differing values from leftist goals? And as long as there is a separation of church and state, then it doesn’t really matter what religious beliefs someone holds.

I would make the argument that the difference between A and B is not “dialing down the feminism”, but more about the general demeanor/civility/methods. You can address the issues of B without blaming it on feminism.

If you take two people who are vegan. A will sit down and talk to you about the reasons behind their choice to be vegan, and try to convince you to give veganism a try or even just reduce your meat consumption and supplement it with vegan meals. And B will get in your face and yell at you about what a horrible monster you are for eating animal products. I wouldn’t say that B is “more vegan” than A. And I wouldn’t say that the problem with B is that they’re too vegan. The issue is with how they treat others.

Exactly this! The DNC failures are completely irrelevant.

People never should have voted for a candidate boasting about creating the most lethal military and finishing the border wall to keep all the evil immigrants out.

Wait, what do you mean that was Harris’s campaign?

The problem is that while it’s true Harris would have been a better outcome than this shitshow currently happening (which is why I voted for her), Harris was still trying to tack to the fucking right. Instead of standing in opposition to Trump, she relented on his talking points. Instead of pushing back on the anti immigrant narrative and acknowledging the border wall for the racist bullshit waste of money that it is, she criticized him for not actually finishing it, and promised that she would finish the job herself.

You don’t think that is a failure of the DNC trying to pivot right to be able to capture the never trump Republicans while losing support from the core of their party? If you want people to vote for you, give them a fucking reason to vote for you. Don’t pose yourself as a watered down version of the other candidate. And then get upset for people not voting for the lesser evil when you’re doing your best to get as close as possible to the greater evil without copying them completely.

People always argue that we could have pushed Harris farther left after she was elected, but how do we do that? During the run up to election, with the primaries and everything was the best time to push for her to change her policy. During that time, you have your vote as leverage. And you communicate what you want to see from the candidate in order to get your vote. After she’s elected, what leverage do the people have to get her to enact progressive policies? And during the primaries, people were very vocal about wanting Harris to change her policy on Israel and Gaza. And even with the pressure, and knowing exactly what she had to do to gain those votes, she refused to budge.

This is more like being stuck in a bus heading towards a cliff, and one person is telling you they’re going to floor it and go off the cliff going 90 mph and the other person saying that would go off the cliff at a reasonable 60 mph instead. I get that one is technically better than the other, and that perhaps we don’t have the luxury of finding the perfect person saying they’re just going to hit the brakes. But do you really expect people to be enthusiastic about someone saying they’re going to take you to the exact same demise but just slightly slower?

Sounds interesting. Any way I can wishlist or sign up for a news letter to be notified about development and release date?

Had me in the first half till I saw the username.

You’re correct in that it is an odd question. But just because it is a question that isn’t commonly asked doesn’t mean that it’s not one that can intuitively be solved.

And the entire point is that AI would never be trained on it. That’s how we are able to demonstrate the difference between AI and humans. For the longest while you could also ask AI how many 'r’s are in the word strawberry. And it would get this wrong. Because people don’t normally go around asking questions about occurrences of letters in words. So this wasn’t in the training data. But if you ask the same question to a human, they’re able to deduce the answer. Even though it is a peculiar question, and doesn’t get asked often. The entire point is that the AI are able to parrot little tidbits that they’ve been trained on. Like being able to walk short distances, or the environmental impact of cars, etc. But they’re not able to reason in the same way that a human can.

And what do you mean of course the car is there? Under what circumstances would your car be sitting at a car wash, without you in it, unwashed, when you want to wash your car. This is such a ridiculous leap to make. Did you drive your car to the car wash, park it, and get out to walk 50 meters away? Did somebody else drive your car to the carwash without you and just leave it there? It makes no sense.

I’m not sure I follow your logic. My /s is there because tone can be ambiguous within text. I don’t think tone is relevant to the question. Do you think that a tone indicator would have made the question more clear?

The point is that all the information is either present or implied in the question. You can spend all day nitpicking the ambiguity of questions all you want, but it doesn’t get you anywhere. There comes a point where it gets exhaustive trying to preemptively cut off follow up questions and make clarifications.

When you are in school and they give you a word problem such as “you have 10 apples and give 3 to your friend. How many do you have left?” It is generally agreed upon what the question is asking. It’s intentionally obtuse to sit there and say the question is flawed because you may have misplaced some of your apples, or given some to another friend, or someone may have come and stolen some, or some may have started to rot and so you threw them out, or perhaps you miscounted and you didn’t actually give 3 to your friend.

That’s a very good point! For that matter the car could still be at the bar where I got drunk and took an uber home last night. In which case walking or driving would both be stupid.

Or perhaps I’m in a wheelchair, in which case I wouldn’t really be ‘walking’.

Or maybe the car wash that is 50 meters away is no longer operating, so even if I walked or drove there, I still wouldn’t be able to walk my car.

Is the car wash self serve or one of the automatic ones? If it’s self serve what type of currency does it take? Does it only take coins or does it take card as well? If it takes coins, is there a change machine out front? Does the change machine take card or only bills? Do I even have my wallet on me?

There are so many details left out of this question that nobody could possibly fathom an answer!

…/s if it’s not obvious

Are they even accusing the article itself of manufacturing consent? The way I read that, it was talking about online spaces and communities falling for the manufactured consent. Which is not coming from the reporting, but from propagandists, who use the reporting to help them manufacture consent.

I’m nowhere near well versed enough on the topic to chime in. But isn’t this the same excuse people try to throw against supporters of Palestine? “Oh yeah you support ending the genocide in Palestine? Did you know they throw LGBT people off the rooftops”.

Regardless of the truth/inaccuracy of the statement. It seems like it’s not really that relevant to the conversation and just thrown out there as a cheap gotcha. Does the suppression of LGBT individuals mean that their overall quality of life hasn’t improved? Does a country have to be perfect and not have other social changes that need to be worked towards in order to acknowledge progress? This is not an endorsement of China, again I’m not knowledgeable enough on the topic. But just a criticism of this rebuttal.

Gestures broadly at the US.

While that’s true, I think by positioning ourselves at the 2nd state, it allows us to “negotiate” our way down to getting the 1st state. Its kind of like haggling. If you start at the more extreme position, opposition will (in an ideal scenario) try to find a middle ground to agree on. And that middle ground would look like the 1st state. It’s a way of combatting the ratcheting effect.

Woah. That sounds interesting. Care to elaborate?

It’s literally the artist’s self insert OC. How else are they supposed to communicate that they’re talking about a personal experience about them self and not speaking broadly on the topic? Notice how the person commissioning the NSFW art is pictured very plainly without much detail. That’s because they’re a generic stand-in. But the artist is more detailed, because they are a specific person.

Or. And hear me out here. The message of the comic is “the author thinks sex is gross. The author doesn’t like drawing sex. The author is willing to give up on those values for the right sum of money.” And it’s a tongue in cheek joke about how their opinions can be easily swayed by financial incentives, rather than a reflection of all artists.

I completely agree on the idea of voting for Harris for harm reduction. But I’m genuinely curious why you think her being elected would put us in a better position to get progressive reform. She showed that she was completely unwilling to back down or change her stance to get elected. Once she had won the election, there really isn’t any reason for her to change her stance. Even the idea that she would try to gain popularity to be reelected seems unlikely. Because if we have already proven that we’ll vote for someone not because they have good policies, but because they have less bad policies. The next election would be the same. With her most likely running for reelection. And either Trump or some other far right extremist running against her, forcing a repeat of the hypothetical 2024 election where she won.

It’s a rather bleak cycle, that makes it frustrating when people constantly hammer against the voters for not holding their nose and voting for the lesser of two evil, rather than the Democratic party in general for not listening to what their constituents want, and changing to a more populist progressive policy. I don’t agree with the protest voters, but I can at least empathize and understand where they’re coming from.

The really depressing thing is that even after losing because of it, we’re still not seeing much of a shift within the party. This should have been a wake up call for them. But it seems they still haven’t learned their lesson and seem more intent on using the Republican party as a cudgel to beat the population into voting for them, rather than actually adopting policies that make people want to vote for them.

I agree with the sentiment, but the reason they’re looking at third party apps is to avoid the control that payment processing companies have over censorship following the whole Visa/MasterCard issue.

Mind sharing what extension you use?

I’m not sure I follow your logic. This doesn’t seem like propaganda to me, or “technically true.” It just flat out is true. The headline doesn’t say that only ATC were receiving the emails. The headline is just highlighting that specific subgroup, because that’s the point of the article. Showing that while yes, all federal employees received those emails, one particular group received those emails, which were sent out shortly before 2 major incidents involving plane crashes.

The point isn’t that only ATC received this email. It’s about the consequences of sending this out to all federal federal employees across the board, and highlighting the risk of this using an example of consequences that have already happened. And most likely the buyouts aren’t directly responsible for the crashes, the timeline seems too quick for that. But considering that ATC is already understaffed, this is only going to exacerbate the problem we’re already seeing.

If I take a sledgehammer to all my walls, and knock down a load bearing wall in the process and cause the building to collapse, would you be upset about a headline reading “Man causes building collapse after knocking down load bearing wall”? Would you consider it propaganda because I wasn’t only knocking down load bearing walls, I was knocking down all the walls. Or would you understand that the headline is highlighting the part of the story that is relevant to the article that is being written.

I do agree with you on the main headline though. If I’m understanding the article correctly, they’re easing protections against gender and sexual orientation based protections, and increasing the hoops sexual assault victims have to jump through. So the headline is just blatantly misleading.

The thing that concerns me, is where does it stop? This is something I’ve been thinking about all through the election cycle, and even now. I understand the idea of voting for lesser evil. And that’s exactly what I did. But when you vote for the lesser evil, you are showing your support of that evil. You are sending a message that it’s an acceptable level of evil. That it’s tolerable as long as the alternative is something worse. And it allows the Democrats to keep shifting further right little by little.

We already saw that with Harris campaigning on having “the most lethal military”, and talking about how she’s going to continue building Trump’s wall. (Something Biden did, but at least wasn’t campaigning on, and acting like it’s a selling point). Maybe the next democratic candidate will be even more anti immigrant, but still pro lgbtqia+. So we have to vote for them over the Republican candidate. Then the next dem candidate is only pro lgb, but anti trans. Democrats were already talking about how Harris’s support of trans people lost her the election. When she never even openly campaigned on any trans issues as far as I saw.

And we can elect the lesser of two evils and then protest and send a message about the issues that we don’t support them on. But at the end of the day, what incentive do they have to change? What are you going to do about it? Not vote for them and get the greater evil?

Obviously voting 3rd party just splits the left leaning candidates votes and allows the right to win. But unconditional support of the democratic party seems like it just allows them to take a leisurely stroll towards the right every election. I don’t have an actual answer. But the idea of continuously voting for the lesser evil as the lesser evil becomes incrementally more evil doesn’t really sit well with me.