Aesthetics, plus the seductive appeal that pre-modern, pre-liberal-democratic societies (when the governments were authoritarian, the women were submissive, and the men “were men”) have for reactionaries, incels, and cryptofacists.

All true, but that doesn’t disprove my point. The risk was non-zero, so it was still worth investigating.

Yes but the difference is that there were reasonable grounds to suspect that prolonged exposure to RF waves might possibly cause some harmful effects. The WHO didn’t categorize radio frequency radiation as a potential carcinogen based on no evidence at all:

https://www.iarc.who.int/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/pr208_E.pdf

The possibility of there being a link was not absurd, per se.

To be fair, the evidence about a link between cell phone radiation and cancer has been inconclusive for quite some time. After all, a series of inconclusive or null results doesn’t mean there is categorically no link – it could equally mean that more research is needed.

That said, I do agree that if there were a casual link in this case then it would have made itself apparent by now, given the huge increase in cell phone usage over the past few decades.

30 is way too many. Ideally, you want about 4-5 parties in order to maintain a healthy democracy without getting bogged down.

Either way, the two party corporate duopoly of the US ain’t it.

As someone who has lived in Thailand, I get why Thais were pissed. The hotel, the taxi, the public transport all look like they’re from 30 years ago. Yes, you do still find run-down buildings and tuk-tuks in Bangkok today, but it’s generally a lot more developed and modern than westerners expect on first arrival. Instead of showing the reality, the creators of this ad went out of their way to portray an outdated caricature.

To an outsider it might seem like nitpicking, but Thais are fed up with being presented this way to an international audience.

Being profoundly ignorant on a topic has never stopped him from tweeting about it.

Because he is the owner of the very platform that helped to stir up the recent neofascist riots in the UK that led to POC being attacked and terrorized and properties looted and burned. His tweets are seen by millions of people, and greatly contribute towards online extremism and polarization.

Like it or not, Twitter is still the de-facto place for breaking news stories. You just have to sift through the dross.

As much as Mastodon is a far nicer and healthier social platform, it has a long way to go before it gets anywhere close in this particular regard.

There is no rule that says the universe must make sense to human beings. In fact the more we learn about it - subatomic particles, quantum mechanics, the multiverse, etc. the stranger it becomes and the less it appears to operate in ways that are intuitive to our primitive primate brains.

Hell, even space and time might not be fundamental properties, and could themselves be abstractions which emerge from an even deeper underlying reality…

All of which is to say your list should have an extra option:

D. Who The Fuck Knows?

As someone married to a JW and who is friends with several others, I will say this: like any group of people, they can be a mixed bag. Some are more closeted and “in the truth” whereas others are more outgoing and “worldly”.

One the things that I actually admire about them (the individuals, mind you, not the Watchtower organization) is that they really seem to try and live by the teachings of the Bible and study it frequently. Much more so than, say, your average evangelical Protestant.

As someone who is mostly agnostic, those who belive that absence of evidence equals evidence of absence belong in psychotherapy.

This position is a straw man. Atheists generally do not argue that God categorically does not exist. Instead, we usually say that we don’t believe in God because there is insufficient evidence. Much like the proverbial invisible unicorn in your backyard - since there is no evidence that it exists, there is no reason for it to affect how we go about our daily lives.

When it comes to whether you’re agnostic or atheist, I think it helps to answer the following question on a scale of 0 - 10: How confident are you that God exists? If you say around 5, then you’re agnostic. If you say around 1 or 2, then you’re an atheist.

Or the EMF generators they carry around with them in their pockets, A.K.A their phones.

I’d say a good-sized part of it is simply the American preference for watching beautiful, weathly people doing beautiful, wealthy people things. Hollywood rom-coms and US TV shows in general clearly skew towards upper middle class settings when compared to the equivalents from, say, the UK.

In other words, I reckon US media prefer their fictional characters to be aspirational whereas other cultures prefer theirs to be relatable.

More frequent kernel updates.

• requires a fair bit of post-installation configuration (suboptimal OOTB experience for newbies)
• Uses btrfs by default but comes with no snapshots or GUI manager pre-configured for system restore
• Less software availability compared to Ubuntu or Mint
• More likely to break than Ubuntu or Mint

The Death of Stalin is great.

But isn’t this something you can tweak within your DE configuration? I’m on Gnome and don’t have this issue.

This sounds like a DE thing than a Wayland/X thing.

It’s not so much saying that someone’s religious beliefs are logically impossible, more highly unlikely. When I typically see this rhetoric, it’s generally along the lines of “how on Earth did you weigh up all the evidence (or lack thereof) and come to the conclusion that God exists?”, or more impolite words to that effect.

I personally don’t browbeat the religious, so I’m not condoning it, but that’s why this line of argument generally isn’t gnostic atheism.

If, on the other hand, someone is actually saying that the existence of God is logically impossible, a priori, then that would be gnostic atheism. But, like I said before, that generally isn’t what most atheists believe or argue for.