As someone who owns an F-150 of the same era with the same 300 c.i. inline six engine, I can attest to how terrifyingly deadly it is to deer and presumably pedestrians as well. It's already big and I struggle to imagine what it's like to drive something even bigger on a regular basis for typical consumer car tasks. Honestly I would love a tiny Hilux but they command ridiculous money in this area because they're popular for rock crawler/off-road builds. Some auto company should follow Subaru's footsteps and make a small truck marketed at dykes. Ted Cruz might want a mean, threatening, monstrous truck, but lesbians know you don't need a big truck to be good in the bedroom :)
"Why do tomatoes split" feels like a very Missouri question. Surprise week-long summer rains can really do in those almost-ripe tomatoes that were used to dry & hot conditions.
If people object to the death sentence "on moral, religious and policy grounds", it seems like an incredible leap to argue that such executions are just. One need look no further than the BLM protests to observe that "legal" and "just" are two wholly different things.
Something that I don't really care for about this particular style of discourse is that, fundamentally, it's a lot of words in defense of a somewhat milquetoast idea. Paul clearly feels like this point needs a solid defense. While I can imagine people who'd disagree with the general principle he's arguing for, it's not all that controversial. Paul was clearly thinking of something when he wrote this, as he felt it timely and worthy of defense, but it's not clear what. It'd engender a lot more interesting discussion were he to discuss some concrete examples, as then we could talk more about whether the principle here fits the situations he has in mind. Two people might agree that being helplessly addicted to drugs, but one could be thinking of harsh sentencing and three strikes laws for drug dealers and the other could be thinking of taxpayer-funded rehab programs. It's a fine general principle, but the social outcomes of the specific implementations of it are vastly different, and therein lies some interesting discussion that's denied by speaking in general terms.
Please let's hold off on the bad-faith assumptions, okay?
I think we're far more likely to see a hotly contested election than an outright cancellation. There's a reason we've been arguing about mail-in voting for months now.
I don't see them out there much; trimming a few branches back helped too.
We have an incredibly handsome red wing blackbird who visits our feeder all the time. Don't see his wife all that often, but she does come by once in a while. I love the little dances he does and the way he fans his tail out:
I like to think he's showing off for me :)
Based on the all the defamation suits, I'd give even odds that they're peeved they can't manipulate their family into loving them.
What's it like to know that your family paid you $400,000 to fuck off forever?
That would be an ideal situation; hopefully it works out! Technically the copyright for my book is undetermined; the department paid to have me teach a course with the understanding that I'd write the book for it in the process, so maybe it is theirs, but also faculty usually own their course materials, so I have decided to just claim the copyright and if it ever becomes an issue we can argue about it then. It'd be foolish to argue copyright on a book that turns no profit anyway.
It's interesting to see the differentiation between "the president as president" and "the president as citizen", and good to know that there's at least some level of not being able to use presidential authority to influence personal court cases, at least in theory.
Understandably so. The setting is quite neat to me as it sorts out a few of the more tricky questions YEC has to answer but yet manages to still draw out the point that scientific facts are only as good as our interpretation of the evidence can be. Are there things you do have faith in?
What'd you think of Omphalos? The utterly fascinating bit for me is that the last prayer outlines basically the same mental shift I had to do, and coincidentally the scientific push for me to do that was also learning a bit of astronomy. I feel like that shift could have been better foreshadowed, though; I feel like it was wanting to be a twist of an ending, and in my opinion such an ending should lend a new perspective on a re-reading of the story. I'm not sure this one does.
I think I'm in the same spot and I'm not sure if I like it.
I'm not done with it yet; the quality feels a bit spottier than his older work but I'm probably just remembering it more fondly. Thanks! I found it in one of the bins of scrap Unicode characters we have under the workbench.Slick №., by the way.
Done!, though without the shoutouts...
In his defense, taken at face value this letter can read pretty harmlessly (if one does not read too close), and certainly not all its concerns are unfounded. On the other hand, he should know better than to read this at face value, goddammit. The letter, ironically, uses the same tactic that cancel culture does. In the same way that one can go from "so-and-so ships two underage characters" to "so-and-so is a sexual abuser and a pedophile", so here we have "so-and-so is vocally opposed to uncritical support of police violence" becoming "so-and-so is taking away freedom of speech".
I'd support mandatory voting with a required "No Choice" option so people can still exercise their freedom to not choose, but also voter suppression becomes much more difficult.
I guess manufacturing consent makes more money than Manufacturing Consent
Look, someone has to represent the cows in Congress, otherwise you get too many pork barrel bills.
I mean, the CHAZ seems to be a pretty clear example that the protests are, in fact, a surprisingly successful rehearsal of a revolution. Sure, not everyone wants it, but the point of the demonstration is to show people what is possible in a very non-theoretical way. Given the proliferation of other autonomous zones in other cities, it seems that people are learning from Seattle's demonstrations. In quite a few cities, electoralism has failed to control the police: many of these demonstrations are being held in cities with Democratic leadership and the police have universally stepped up the brutality in response and defied or used loopholes in rules and laws meant to restrain them. It's perhaps understandable that demonstrators aren't excited about more of the same approach. A ballot initiative that passes is only as effective as the people implementing it, and politicians seem wishy-washy on the whole defund/abolish point still. See also this reading on legibility which is a salient issue at this point. Black people in particular have been denied state legibility systematically; describing their needs in language the state understands is thus a challenge. A friend looked into recalling the Seattle mayor by ballot and found that it'd be a pretty difficult process, especially given social distancing right now. Not sure how similar that is to getting a ballot initiative, though.
So, I too grew up in a fundamentalist christian family, going to church, learning to evangelize from the likes of Ray Comfort, believing in a literal six day creation about 6-10 thousand years ago, etc. etc. I get it. My parents and siblings are still there; the reason I'm not is my parents made the mistake of letting me go to a state university instead of a christian one. It seems to me that the negativity you're expressing here requires you to buy their "false christians" argument. You see christians who equate "being christian" and "supporting Trump" as the ones who matter to you; the rest are less significant. I see a bunch of christians realizing that maybe Trump has been pulling the wool over their eyes and that they don't actually want four more years of this guy. And from my outsider's perspective, that's good news. I'm interested in christianity as a social, economic, and political structure. If christians are starting to question their politics, that means a slow shift in what those church structures support. If Trump is inadvertently starting to fracture the Religious Right, even if that just means a depressed conservative vote rather than votes for progressives, that's a good thing. That all said, November is months away, and this very well might all be rearranging the deck chairs on H.S.S. Four More Years.
I'm going to start working on a longer post on this because I've recently started a conversation with one of my sisters and it's drawn out some memories I hadn't seen in a while and it would be good to have those saved while I can still recall them. It's a lot to talk about because, as you said, it's a whole worldview, and unwinding one of those that you were exclusively exposed to as a kid is not a short process. It's been a decade and I'm still not really done. And it touches on some quite personal details, so there will be parts you'll just have to take me at my word for. But, the really short version is: I moved away to college, which gave me a social and institutional structure that wasn't tied to church and family. My parents had heavily tied the truth of young earth creationism with the truth of christianity, and learning physics and biology disabused me of the former, so I felt that the latter was maybe suspect too. By dint of making woman, queer, and non-white friends I narrowly avoided falling into New Atheism or alt-lite libertarianism (although it certainly did help that those groups tended to fall for some of the same conservative fallacies I was by that point quite allergic to). Ironically, the christian groups I grew up in pay lip service to a lot of good ideals; perhaps my saving grace was that I took those ideals a bit more seriously than everyone around me.
The timing may have been deliberate, but either way as that EO wasn't the exact topic of this ruling, I'm fine with them having left it off. There are several issues this ruling leaves undecided, most critically the issue of sex-segregated locker rooms and bathrooms and the issue of how much protection the RFRA gives employers. But this ruling, I think, will mean that any exceptions are going to require a very strong argument.
“Ultimately, the decision to manage these larger socioeconomic problems with law enforcement and with prisons ends up winning out,” said Elizabeth Hinton, a historian at Harvard who has written a book on that era. That choice largely remains with us today. Mr. Ramsey dislikes the phrase “defund the police.” But he supports the idea that some police funding should be redirected after years of growth in the police mission. “I don’t even have a problem with that if they re-allocate to give more to substance abuse counselors and mental health professionals,” Mr. Ramsey said. “But then take away some of that responsibility from the police. Don’t just take away money; take away responsibility as well.” Across these 150 large cities, the average share of general expenditures devoted to the police has gradually increased by about 1.2 percentage points since the late 1970s, to 7.8 percent. That change is relatively modest. But it means that residents have watched city police budgets rise by millions of dollars annually — even during lean years for city finances, and through a steep nationwide decline in violent crime that began in the early 1990s.
The long rise in spending is also rooted in the war on crime that began in the 1960s. Federal and local officials wrestled then with how to address concentrated poverty and racial segregation in cities — whether to focus on welfare programs or social control.
“The police have been used to fill the gaps where city services are not adequate,” said Charles H. Ramsey, the former police chief in Philadelphia and Washington, and a co-chair of President Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing.
Why not just have social workers? Do they need to be cops at all? Why not take money from police departments who are poorly doing too many things and spend that on infrastructure and social programs that actually do a good job of taking care of people?
The thing is, the police as you are imagining them here do not exist. If they did, we wouldn't have all these protests and police violence. You're not wrong for wanting something like you imagine, but given how bad things are and how resistant policing has been to any reforms, I don't think you're going to get it until you abolish the police.