I hope republicans/conservatives have to learn their lesson the hard way around.

You are banking on people who have likely never picked up and read a single book after high school, and who likely read at a fifth grade level or less, to learn?

Especially when they have proven themselves to be such gullible rubes and suckers, uncritically swallowing everything the alt-right says like a herd of sheeple?

Buddy… you sound as reality-avoidant as they are.

Good. They need a solid contract.

I was just saying your islamopobia was showing.

Thank you for proving my point for me. You wielded it like the duplicitous cudgel it was designed to be - to protect the religion instead of any person.

Except that the person is intentionally misdirecting the entire convo in order to invalidate an entire highly problematic edifice of issues.

I did no such thing.

Orly?

My Muslim neighbor seems pretty chill. I doubt he partakes in honor killings, sexual slavery, and/or apostate killings in his free time.

There are extremists in almost any facet of humankind, especially so when religion gets involved. It’s best not to paint everyone with the same brush.

There it is, the “not all Muslims” defence. Totally misdirects away from how “Islamophobia” is wielded to protect all manner of religious-based evil, by throwing up a “no true Scotsman” logical fallacy to force the convo onto the people instead of the religion.

I never focused on the people or even a single person, my argument was entirely the flip side - how a tool that is meant to protect people is instead shielding an entire religion.

If a religion needs protections of any kind from criticisms, censure, or challenges, then it has no right to exist in the first place. And that is what makes “Islamophobia” so unremittingly evil - it protects the religion from anything that can diminish it. It goes out of it’s way to conflate the religion with the people, thereby muddying the waters and making both the exact same thing; usurping what is meant only for the people to include the religion as well.

The so explains the conservative ascendancy. More morons for their electorate who uncritically swallow everything spoon-fed to them, less for the progressives on the left.

the person you’re replying to isn’t entirely wrong either.

Except that the person is intentionally misdirecting the entire convo in order to invalidate an entire highly problematic edifice of issues. “Not all Muslims” is the misdirection, because I am not talking about individuals or even people in general.

I am talking about how an entire concept - “Islamophobia” - is wielded in a maliciously dishonest manner to protect the evils of the religion, specifically and primarily, instead of only the people.

It’s best not to paint everyone with the same brush.

And there is that intellectual dishonesty and malicious misdirection that makes up so much of “Islamophobia” accusations.

International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism suppresses all criticism of the state of Israel.

It seems that Jews and Muslims learn from each other. The widely-used definition of “Islamophobia” does much the same to insulate Islam, the religion, from criticism as well, allowing all sorts of horrific things - from honour killings over sexual slavery to apostate killings - in the name of “protecting Islamic values”.

D) America has ALWAYS had a Canada-invasion plan percolating as a contingency. They update it every half a decade or so to bring it inline with the latest intelligence.

The most recent plans are designed with climate change in mind, in order to secure resources like the grain fields and oil fields of the prairies. Much like the Nazi “Lebensraum” plans for Poland.

Corporate cuts should always start with the greatest fat that does the least work - the ones at the top.

Because if the company has found itself in a place where headcount needs to be reduced, these are the people who led it there and deserve all of the blame for hurting the company to that degree. Plus, you should always start cutting where you get the lowest volume of productive work for the greatest money spent, and that is always at the top.

I would consider the latter to be depraved indifference, but the former to be maliciously genocidal.

Of the two, the former is much, much worse than the latter. And with everything being a spectrum of some kind, the former is much further along the path to being evil than the latter.

With that said, there is no single person pushing all the buttons in Israel; as such, I am sure there are people in the Israeli command structure that represent the former much more than the latter, and vice versa.

But if there is one characterization I feel is wholly appropriate: on Oct 6, Israel looked at the evil of Hamas and said, “hold my beer and watch this.” And boy, did they ever deliver.

$325k for a 3bdrm 2bath detached SFH in good condition?

Awww, that’s adorable. Even after taking the exchange rate into account, that would be like going back to 1998 in my corner of Canada. Right now, a house like that on a 0.21 Ac plot of land would be running you $1,300,000 CAD. In places like Vancouver? $4,800,000 CAD on average.

I have a tube-based distribution system from the second-floor window that I started using during COVID to keep my distance from those plague incubators that came calling, and just never stopped using it.

I live in a moderately cold climate, and Halloween evening nearly always drops to around -5℃ to 5℃. So it’s much nicer to just sit in a cushy armchair by the window with a warm blanket over my legs and drop candy through the tube. A surprising amount of adults, teens, and tweens are tickled pink by that system, although a lot of little kids need a surprising amount of direction to get their candy.

And yes, I always drop either two pieces or - for those in dark hoods and carrying scythes - full-sized snickers.

Removed by mod

I don’t consider that causing harm.
but I still don’t give moral consideration to plants in either case.

So you are species bigot, and a hypocrite for refusing to take the ideology to it’s logical conclusion.

Cool beans.

Plants scream when eaten:

• https://www.sciencealert.com/plants-really-do-scream-out-loud-we-just-never-heard-it-until-now
• https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/botany/plants-feel-pain.htm

Any that’s the hypocrisy of Vegans. Milk and honey are the only two animal-based food sources that don’t involve the killing of animals. And in the case of most cow breeds, milking is actually needed as they have been bred to produce far more milk than their calves drink. And with careful management of the hive, you can harvest a lot of honey from a mature hive without negatively affecting the hive itself - it just delays/defers new queen production and swarming, which is desirable anyhow - no beekeeper who has hives primarily for crop pollination wants to have hives swarming each and every year.

The ONY REASON why immigrant labour is needed is because too much of the profits flow to the Parasite Class at the top.

It used to be that America could build affordable family homes for decent-sized families using well-paid American citizens. This was possible because those Americans were actually paid well enough to afford homes of their own; most of the value of their labour actually came back to them. Plus, most building materials weren’t beset by Greedflation and the need to keep obscene amounts of wealth flowing into pockets that were already overstuffed without more wealth than the person could spend in 100 lifetimes.

America could return to that time, where even the lowest-paid workers make enough to be within a stone’s throw of affording their own home. All it takes is a political leader willing to do the politically painful job of taxing the fuck out of the Parasite Class - including treating any loans taken out using stocks as collateral as “income” to be taxed, regardless of the destination of those funds.

That, plus a metric arseload of other things such as making corporate ownership of homes illegal and making “investor ownership” of homes beyond about 3-5 homes similarly illegal. Because not only do these parasites suck up the supply of homes, preventing renters from getting off the rental market, but they are also the primary players jacking up rents to unaffordable levels, seeking to squeeze every possible dollar out of hard-working Americans. Let these parasites find a real job if they want to continue earning money.

Well said. Then there is the entire ecosystem of programs and apps for which there is no real ability to install on Linux (and for which tools like Wine will either be buggy or even nonfunctional), and whose absence will just piss users off.

As much as I love Linux and BSD, it is really only for people who are either mentally geared to shift off of Windows or whose minimal needs won’t notice the difference; it is not a drop-in replacement for Windows.

For example, my octogenarian father has exactly such minimal needs except for one program: Quicken. Any bugs or issues running that as an installed desktop program on Linux would have him enraged and throwing the PC out the window. So he is still on Windows, and I am keeping my eyes open on how to properly neuter/excise Copilot once it drops.

So far tools like Win10Privacy have been exemplary in allowing me to rip all manner of spyware, adware, and annoyances out of Windows.

I’m sure that Copilot will meet the same fate with one external debloating utility of another. Even if I need to replace the Explorer-based shell with a third-party one.