charcoal23

I'm finding it difficult to see how a Trump voter can complain about tone. Trump himself is usually toxic and abrasive, and relies heavily on petty insults with the eloquence usually found on grade school playgrounds. His followers proudly wore "fuck your feelings" on their clothing, and that seems to have been their operational philosophy ("cucks! snowflakes! get out of your safe spaces!") before they realized how much the rest of the country hated them. Now, ironically, they complain about insults and not being accepted.

With all that in mind, is it any surprise people on the Left treat Trump with zero respect? And can you not understand how ridiculous it is to demand that respect when respect has not been given by your side. From the president on down, there has been no grace, no diplomacy, no kindness. This is a classic "remove the log in your own eye before complaining about the mote in another's" situation.

And that's without getting into how this administration is the most corrupt in modern American history. Perhaps the most corrupt ever in our nation. And is intent on doing as much looting & damage as possible before they're finally kicked out. Difficult to treat someone with respect when they're behaving in such a reprehensible fashion.

Would agree with you that it's semi-mainstream. I grew up evangelical, and I heard that argument many times. Though it was never accepted doctrine nor preached. At least at my baptist church.

But there is one potentially fun part of this silly theology. While discussing this with a never-Christian friend of mine, we both had the epiphany there's an overlap between this doctrine and the "universe is a simulation" idea. Which really amused me.

Maybe, at least with believers of that sort, gnosticism will make a well-deserved comeback.

I had the same problem. After years of Windows laptops, I bought a Macbook back in 2015 because I wanted a change. Ended up with the same problem. Tried all sorts of fixes. Reinstalled the OS several times. It would work for a day after the reinstall and then lock up after every sleep again. I guess it wasn't always a complete lock up. Once when I was beyond frustrated with it, I let it just sit. After 30 minutes, it came back on.

I returned it and went with a Thinkpad instead. On all my Windows laptops, sleep's never been a problem. Even on the cheap machines.

Not long after I moved to Kansas in 2012, I received a postcard supporting some tea party idiot for the legislature. Was a four color printing on thick glossy paper. Paid for by the Koch's PAC Americans for Prosperity. I kept getting these cards every other day until the primary. By comparison, the campaign materials for the other candidates were clearly run off of someone's photocopy machine.

The cards, and bigger publications, started up again before the general. This is in a small rural district. This entire process was repeated across the state and was accompanied by constant television advertising. Led to Brownback getting enough support so he could get his infamous, and disastrous, tax cuts through the previously hostile legislature. Tax cuts strongly supported by the Kochs.

2014 and 2016 saw a repeat of this advertising blitz.

When the Democrats get angry at the Kochs, it's for good reasons. When I saw AFP interfering in something as small as my tiny district, I thought it was quite creepy. Soros's funding hasn't been even remotely as large nor as pervasive.

The FCC under Trump has been very friendly to the large enterprises at the expense of small businesses and customers. Trump himself has approved many regulatory changes which are hostile to small businesses, employees and customers across many different industries.

It's safe to say at this point that we have a clear idea of what decisions Trump and his FCC will make in the future, and that there would little to no hope for decisions which will increase competition. A year is plenty of time for assessing the character of an adminstration, and Trump's has been remarkably consistent in this regard.

It's probably both, but leaning much more towards the grifting side of things. There's something about conservative politics in the US which encourages grifters and cons.

When my very Republican stepfather fell into dementia, I helped my mom monitor his mail so he'd stop spending so much money on things he didn't understand. It was a deluge of stuff every day. Often from groups I had never heard of who wanted money to stop Sharia law or stop the "war on Christmas" or whatever the big conservative cause was that day. And even the mainstream GOP got into the act. More than once, a FedEx envelope would show up with a plea that everything was doomed unless a check was overnighted. Once the GOP FedEx solicitation contained a letter accusing my stepfather of no longer being a member of the Republican Party, but he could clear up this misunderstanding by writing a check.

Using any of the start menu replacements (StartIsBack, Start10, Classic Shell) will give you the old interface and somehow gives you the old search engine too. Has the nice side effects of making Cortana completely disappear and giving you right click uninstall options for all the apps.

I'd agree with your perceived trend. Ubuntu has the right idea with the LTS releases. Microsoft had the right idea with the LTSB, but ruined it by making it limited to enterprise customers.

I hope Apple and Microsoft will start to realize many of their customers see the OS as the layer for getting things done, and not as an end to itself. Annual, or semi-annual, feature updates are not fun, waste time with a slow install, and the features are frequently unwanted. And with the lack of QA in both companies, each major update brings a whole host of new bugs.

I would strongly disagree with you. Christianity can and should be measured by the behavior of its believers. The behavior is the one and only metric we have regarding the efficacy of the faith, since the supernatural claims are something we can neither prove nor disprove.

Christianity is supposed to remake people into something better. Paul had a concept of the "new man" in Christ. If Christians are no better than the secular population, and if the Christian leadership are just as prone (if not more so) to being corrupted by power and money as secular leadership, then it becomes obvious Christianity does not work. Or at least, does not work for the majority of its adherents. There are truly holy women and men out there, but, it's quite clear these are outliers and not representative.

In my personal experience, and in looking at history, it's quite clear Christians are the same, or worse, in most observable behavior as their secular counterparts. Though I'm shouldn't single out Christians. Any faith, which aspires to personal transformation, falls short. I was briefly involved in the American Zen Buddhist community, and then I discovered the faults and greed of the so-called zen masters. If "enlightenment" doesn't free someone from the desire for money, for temporal power, for sexually abusing members, then what good is it? Islam also falls short in many, many ways.

You can certainly believe in whatever you want. I'm sorry you feel harassed about it. But religion is as much a lived experience as it is a product of philosophers and theologians. For many of us, it was an unpleasant experience which no theologian can redeem. And for many others, they see religion used as a lever for power and an excuse for cruelty. When you feel criticized, keep those things in mind. The criticism is not directed at you personally, but is rather a reflection of the person, and their own experiences, making the criticisms.

/r/anarchism and /r/socialism are two that often advocate violence. The latter is dominated by "tankies", which is a term for communists who love Stalin, gulags, and tanks. They frequently take a "kill 'em all" approach. They are also often mocked by other lefties on Reddit, so please don't assume their opinions are popular.

/r/anarchism is a slightly more complicated case. They do advocate violence in a "bash the fash" way. But their intended victims are often those who advocate for genocide, ethnic cleansing, and other racist or misogynistic methods. Their violent earnestness is also often mocked by the rest of political Reddit.

/r/LeftWithoutEdge was a sub formed for serious discussion for lefties without resorting to violent speech. It doesn't get enough traffic so I urge any leftists / anarchists here to visit it occasionally.

Edit: I should add that one reason /r/anarchism and /r/socialism are still on Reddit is because they took the warnings of the admins seriously. /r/anarchism dialed their rhetoric back after being told they were on the verge of being banned. Most of the banned right wing subs ignored the warnings, and often doubled-down.

Kant isn't directly used in ways which oppress or abuse people. His works are generally not used as the foundation of unpleasant systems. Children are not raised to think of Kant as infallible, nor are they punished for failing to follow his dictates.

People criticize religion without extensively reading the theology because religion is a lived experience in a way that Kant isn't.

That's the view of the atonement as presented in fundamentalist / evangelical circles. Reduced to snarky absurdity, but the theology is itself absurd.

Perhaps this is different than your own experience or reading, but it doesn't make this experience less valid. Considering this is the dominant form of Christianity in the US, I think it's safe to say the snarky statement above accurately describes Christianity as how a majority of us experienced it.

My childhood spent in a very restrictive environment, and watching how "Christians" behave, definitely gives me the right to speak on behalf of Christianity, and the right to reject it completely as the fraud it is. I understand it completely well.

All I have to do is observe what they do. From the near-abuses of my own experience, to how the Orthodox have been perfectly willing to embrace Putin and other cruel leaders, to how women and gay people are frequently treated. There's the cruelty dispensed by the faithful over the millennia. In your own response there's no shred of Christ's love or humility. You offer nothing but cold, empty judgements rushing to defend and insult.

All of this shows there is little to nothing of worth in the system, and wasting hours of my irreplaceable life reading men (and it's always men) debate how many angels can fit atop a pin, is not going to convince me otherwise.

Indeed it is. However, it will be the dominant experience of Christianity for many of us. Hence the previous snarky statement, and how that statement is correct for those of us who endured that experience.

The "snarky dig" is an accurate description of what American fundamentalists / evangelicals believe. If you want to complain about that particular bit of theology, you're complaining to the wrong person.

I was also raised in a fundamentalist / evangelical church. I'll back you up on this as your interpretation is completely correct. coldtea's interpretation would be completely alien in any of the churches of my youth. In the United States at least, it would be completely alien outside of academia.

I have no idea what prompted this reaction or an accusation of trolling.

I like the approach of Chromebooks. Safe and secure in its default state. Can switch to "dev mode" which gives you a less secure but much more open system. And then can open the case, remove the write-protect screw, and have a fully open system. If any problems develop, or you simply want to go back to a locked-down secure state, you can very easily reset the machine to it's original configuration.

My personal approach to the problem is multiple devices. Linux laptop and Windows desktop for my open systems. iPhone and Chromebook for when I don't want to worry.

The Uber driver will not always be an Uber driver. And probably has something already lined up if he's paying for his new house via a mortgage. The reference to a 100k job was making a comparison between the quality of life in different parts of the country, and not an assumption the Uber driver was actually making 100k.

Topeka is the capital of Kansas. There are jobs with the state government and jobs in businesses connected with the state government. It's also a city of 125,000 people with the usual mix of jobs. Not extremely vibrant economically but not particularly depressed either. Just an ordinary small Midwestern city.

Lawrence is the home of the University of Kansas, and is only 30 minutes down the road from Topeka. Quite a few opportunities there, including startups. Kansas City is about 40 minutes away down the turnpike with the opportunities of a 2+ million metro area.

No, he's not going to make the sort of money you do in California, but he's not moving to some economic wasteland either. He won't have too much trouble pulling in 50-70,000 in some white collar job and, considering the cost of living, he'll be quite comfortable. Probably more comfortable than a 100k job in SF or LA.

I live in a dying, rural small town. Well, dying is too strong a word. The population isn't growing, but it's not shrinking either. Stable for the past 20 years. Has around 800 people.

Anyways, this town was founded as a railroad hub in the 1880's. Both a freight hub taking farmers' harvests and delivering goods to the farmers, and a passenger hub transporting people from the surrounding counties into the nearest big cities. The town also provided necessary services at a time when traveling more than 15-20 miles was a hardship. There was a grocery store, general store, cinema, funeral home, pharmacy, bars, couple of hotels, hardware store, and so on. Was a central gathering place for the farmers, and the people who provided services for the farmers.

Many of those businesses are long gone now. The town is still vital for farming because of its mill & grain elevator, and the hardware store still does great business. But the rest is gone. Even the railroad moved away. There are no tracks left in town and the main route is 20-30 miles away. The town survives because of inertia. And because some people are willing to commute an hour to their work in exchange for having a house in the country, and a school with small class sizes for their kids.