Photuris

Same! This is 100% on my radar now.

Hell yeah

No stereo is a bit spartan, but definitely a move in the right direction regardless. I want one.

I overlocked my Pentium 133 to 150.

I was such a badass.

Anon has never heard of lamps, either.

Cool, I’m done with Perplexity.

This lady has been divorced twice.

Not that I otherwise care. Do what you want with your life and relationships - life is complex and difficult at times. Not every relationship works out, sadly.

But for a twice-divorced lady to tell women to “submit to men,” it sounds like she herself has a problem keeping her trap shut and submitting to a man. The hypocrisy is so thick here you can cut it with a knife.

Rules for thee but not for me.

That’s a good response.

I don’t know. I do know that the MAGA world in which I live (the southern US) is inundated with religion, like fish are inundated with water, and it’s religion that is used by the elites to influence regular folks.

(Btw, I may be a right-wing shitlib relative to you guys, but out here where I live I’m basically a commie. It’s relative.)

So yeah, maybe all this is colored by my own experiences. I’m not a Middle East expert by any stretch. But I do have an axe to grind. I admit that.

Every discussion with MAGA eventually invokes religion in some way, explicitly or implicitly. And it is severely frustrating and exhausting. If I talk about “material conditions” (as best I can, I’m not brilliant about these things either), e.g., collective bargaining, taxing wealth instead of labor, how spreading health care coverage risk across the entire population and detangling insurance from employment actually frees people to start small businesses, and so on, they’ll nod along with me, and say things like they “actually like Bernie,” but eventually the conversation gets turned to some culture war issue informed by religion. I have to keep Bible quotes in my memory just to talk with these people and rebut their culture war bullshit.

I fucking hate it, man. The churches, mosques, and synagogues, how I hate them. 🔥🔥🔥

Maybe I didn’t belong in this thread. I’ve never been to the Middle East.

There’s a part of me that would like to see all priests, mullahs, and rabbis strung up and hanged, and every church, mosque, and synagogue set ablaze. I guess that’s not very Liberal or Progressive of me (or Socialist or Social Democratic either, for that matter, even though I don’t label myself that way, especially around here), and I should work on that. Maybe it’s not healthy or helpful, and writing things helped me examine it a bit more closely.

It wouldn’t resolve all conflict. Sociopaths would continue to exist, as would material conflicts and ethnic tensions and so on.

But it would remove one large confounding variable. It would make a difference. How much exact difference, I’m not sure, but a non-zero difference.

Religious / cult-captured minds are the most difficult to appeal to. And by the way, not all cults are spiritual or metaphysical in nature (as I’ve learned by talking with my MAGA neighbors), but again, one less impediment. Half of my MAGA neighbors’ “reasoning” stems from fucking religion (the other half from a personality cult plus identity politics).

Huh, I didn’t know that.

Pope Francis did nearly nothing to clean his own house of the kiddie diddlers.

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So, different flavors of religious nonsense, with variant relative degrees of fundamentalism and wingnuttery.

I know that Hezbollah is not the same thing as ISIS; but religion and politics is never a good combo, and it never has been (it’s a tool wielded by politicians to influence people, and we’d all be better off without it).

For example, the Palestinian / Israeli conflict is one that needs to be resolved, and Palestinians have a right to exist in prosperity and peace with their neighbors, as do Jews.

The conversation about how Israel and Palestine can coexist peacefully, and what to do about land, and all that, is not served by debates about whether or not The Prophet ascended to Heaven on a winged horse at the site of Al Aqsa / The Temple Mount, and whether or not rebuilding the Temple Mount will bring about the Eschaton / the Return of Christ / Armageddon, and whether or not The Madhi will be there too, and so on. That hocus pocus bullshit just severely muddies the waters for everybody.

We don’t want pentagon officials to be handsome for television.

We want them to be competent.

Probably.

But ugh. What’s wrong with a printed, laminated menu‽

The wealthy people who can’t afford to own Disneyland are closer to you than they are the people who can afford to own Disneyland.

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Neat, that was really helpful.

Yes, I’d simply picked my instance at random.

Isn’t Thiel gay?

What’s with these weirdos?

I don’t see the appeal of this Opus Dei shit, at all.

Basically, how can we, as humans, use our propensity for destroying entire species, but do it for the power of good, on purpose so we can eliminate ALL TICKS FROM THE FACE OF THE EARTH‽