Take the time to give that information, briefly but politely. It won't burn bridges and it's helpful for leadership to know.

It’s potentially worse than useful and actively confusing.

Welcome to philosophy! I’d recommend reading Spinoza, he lays it out very intelligently.

It’s simultaneously a way of disproving the existence of God (he was kicked out of his Jewish community and hounded around Europe by the Catholics for his atheism), and a way of replacing it with the concept of the infinite / of the universe. Lends itself to meditation and contemplation, but not to any kind of religious dogma.

BTW, the concept has nothing to do with love, or the fundamental aspect of humanity, etc. It’s just infinite extension, which encompasses every aspect of humanity, and of everything else.

I have a more complicated answer these days than I used to… the short answer is “no,” but the caveats make it longer.

I don’t believe in a god in the sense of an all knowing human type being that has thoughts and wishes and passes down commandments – basically, not the religious kind of God.

At the same time, I appreciate a lot of the Jewish traditions I grew up with, and Judaism has a lot more lassitude around what “God” means to you. To me, it’s Baruch Spinoza’s conception of God … basically, just “the universe,” of which each person is an integral part.

So in a “college freshman on acid feeling one with the universe,” kind of way, sure I believe in God. In a, “He got upset I masturbated way,” then no, not at all.

It became the de jure culture war issue. People who didn’t care before, do now – because now it’s a team sport.

I mean look, it’s cool that they’re doing this and all, and the idea or a trans Atlantic flight in 3 hours is neat for sure … but air travel is already really damn fast, could we focus on making it less shit in other ways?

• Can we get the carbon footprint down so it doesn’t contribute so much to the end of the world?

• Can we cut fuel costs significantly so it doesn’t have to be so miserably expensive?

Damn right we are

I’ve got chestnut trees in my yard, but they’re Japanese chestnuts – yours might be, too.

My dad has been obsessed with this my whole life. The dude just really likes American chestnut trees.

He’s part of an advocacy organization that is testing blight resistant genetic hybrids, and planting chestnuts in their yards to preserve them in the meantime.

If you, too want to be obsessed with chestnut trees, I believe it’s tacf.org

Not any of the materials I’ve received until recently, and those folks have been spamming me for the better part of 20 years.

So like… yeah, sure, that’s true. At the same time overturning a judicial precedent this well established is an absolute first, and public support for Roe v Wade started relatively low and has been steadily growing since then.

So when you’ve got all kinds of immediate, pressing issues, why waste a narrow political margin on alienating a big swathe of voters by publicly confirming a right that everyone already has?

I can’t fault any individual administration for not focusing on this… I can fault the voters, though.

Ah yes, “fear”, the notorious antonym for “attraction.”

Phobia is the opposite of philia; they’re Greek suffixes, and they meant, and still mean, “fleeing from” and “seeking out”; the connotation of “fear” arrived considerably more recently, because of psychiatric conditions being named … in Greek.

If you’re going to a pedantic dummy about etymology, at least take the time to learn a little before you dive in my dude.

For instance, you could object that “homophobia” originally referred to someone who irrationally avoided other humans, and then demand that words never change their meaning and immediately begin proudly speaking fluent proto Indo European.

It doesn’t really have all the communities I’m interested in … but for most of my looking-at-memes and commenting-on-things needs, it works great. I use lemmy exclusively on mobile and haven’t touched reddit on my phone since sync went away, but I still engage with reddit periodically on desktop.

Wow that sounds awful, I guess my imperialist government really misled me! Thanks for finally telling me the truth

Gosh, really? Did they just move out there? How did they get there? Are there many of them? Eye opening stuff!

The existence… of the nation … of Taiwan … is a ridiculous conservative conspiracy theory?

My man, I’ve been there. It existed! Go figure

I have very few writing tasks that don’t require careful consideration, so it’s not super useful in my day to day. But it can be helpful to get the ball rolling on an outline or first draft so I’m not staring at a blank sheet of paper.

How are those things related? There’s a wide spectrum between “right wing wacko” and “tankie nutjob”.

Ooh maybe he can form a third party and field a bunch of candidates for the senate!

For sure, but the fine wasn’t for noncompliance, it was for three days of noncompliance. Pushing that to a week would have cost him over $10m, pushing it to two weeks would have been almost a billion dollars

Iirc this fine started at $50k and each day of noncompliance. Another fine 2x the size of the prior days fine was added.

So noncompliance for another day would have cost another $400k, then $800k, then $1.6m, and so on. By day 30 of noncompliance, the fine would be over $5 billion.