I feel like the extremely low election confidence of independants is also an important part of this story.

You say that, but then why do things like Tumblr and Reddit keep trying to ban the sex to appease advertisers?

Obligatory reminder that Snowden intended to go to Ecuador and only got stuck in Russia because that’s where he was when the US revoked his passport.

Whistleblowers are always treated poorly because the people in charge never like being called out for their crimes. That’s why you’ve got to have an exit strategy, like Snowden.

No one was doing any oversight on their practices.

So that raises the question: where the fuck was the FTC?

It’s a shame it’s still based on a proprietary game engine. I look forward to someday when Skyblivion and Skywind game assets can run in some future version of OpenMW that has feature parity with the Skyrim engine.

At this point they’re often doing more harm (in terms of wide streets with channelized intersections making pedestrians less safe from traffic) than good (in terms of providing truck access in the event of a fire), especially for stations serving single-family neighborhoods.

They need to pay the slight extra cost to have different kinds of appropriate equipment for different areas; it’s worth it. It doesn’t happen because the fire department isn’t considering the traffic effects and nobody’s really looking at the big picture.

Fire departments need to quit insisting on buying the most massive trucks they can possibly find in every situation. Places outside the US get by just fine with much smaller fire trucks than we use (especially for lower density / low-rise areas). We’ve got to quit turning our residential streets into freeways by building them so wide, and the trucks’ bulk and turning radius needs to stop being an excuse.

The key point is that that intention needs to be ascribed to the person, not the inanimate object.

People can have strong opinions about something without that belief indicating that they are devout zealots about that topic.

Of course they can! I not only never said otherwise, I explicitly affirmed it myself:

Meanwhile, scientific skepticism/disbelief in god(s) due to lack of positive evidence is more like agnosticism/weak atheism.

Weak atheism is not a weaker opinion than strong atheism! “Weak” and “strong” are just categorical labels, not value judgements. Moreover, I didn’t make up the terms; if you don’t like them, blame the philosophers, not me.

The difference between weak and strong atheism is not of magnitude, but kind: they have different philosophical underpinnings. Strong atheism is a belief based on faith, while weak atheism is motivated by skepticism and confidence in the utility of the Scientific Method as a framework.

10 dead, 30 injured after car intentionally plows into crowds in New Orleans

Yet another fucking exculpatory headline minimizing the agency of the assailant because his weapon of choice happened to be a car. No, headline writer, the car didn’t do a goddamn thing; its driver did. Even putting “intentionally” in there, while better than nothing, still fails to make up for using the wrong subject!

Better version:

10 dead, 30 injured after assailant intentionally rams car into crowd in New Orleans

This is basically the same type of shit as minimizing police responsibility with headlines like “bystander struck by bullet during officer-involved shooting” (as opposed to “police officer shoots bystander”), and just as systematic and egregious. The only difference is that it’s done in service of car-supremacy rather than the abusive police state. I am really sick and tired of it, in both contexts.

Look, I’m just going by the classification system in the Wikipedia article I cited. I didn’t even slightly imply any of the bullshit you just tried to ascribe to me.

So I mostly agree with you, except the understanding that most gods must not be real is axiomatically true, based on the beliefs of those religions. Almost every religion claims they believe in the one true god(s), so either all the other aren’t real or theirs is wrong and not real. That leaves mostly only one pantheon remaining at most, with maybe a few other that aren’t exclusive.

This feels like a very monotheism-centric argument to me. AFAIK it’s mostly (or only?) the Abrahamic religions that take such an exclusionary view, and I wouldn’t call them “almost every” religion since, although people fight over minor divisions, broadly speaking there’s only three of them. The rest of the world’s religions (Hinduism, Buddhism, shinto, African religions, native American religions, etc.) surely add up to more categories than that.

I’m no theologian, but I would expect polytheistic pantheons not being exclusive to be the rule, not the exception.

And finally, even if we’re just talking about Judaism vs. Christianity vs. Islam, each of their "one true God"s is the same entity anyway so they aren’t nearly as mutually exclusive as their followers would like to pretend.

Thanks for replying!

Many atheists take the label to mean simply: absence of belief. That is: atheists require evidence before making a claim.

Well, yeah: that’s weak atheism (including “explicit weak atheism”, going by that Venn diagram’s categories). I don’t see any contradiction between that and what I wrote; weak atheism certainly still counts as atheism.

Are people getting offended because they think me calling their atheism something other than “strong” is some sort of judgement against them and not simply a categorization?

As such, those that “believe” in nonexistence wind up falling into another category: anti-theists.

That’s not quite what antitheism is. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antitheism :

Antitheism, also spelled anti-theism, is the philosophical position that theism should be opposed.

…

Antitheism has been adopted as a label by those who regard theism as dangerous, destructive, or encouraging of harmful behavior.

In other words, antitheism isn’t so much about the question of god(s) existence directly as it is about considering the behavior of those who answer in the affirmative to be harmful and dangerous. It’s more of an ideological or even political position than a purely philosophical one.

Welp, that was just as ominous and Chinese curse-y as “prepare for unforseen consequences.” Not sure I’m a fan of it applied IRL. 😬

Prion diseases have entered the chat

That’s okay; it happens to all of us (see my edit).

My comment was in the context of replying to https://lemmy.world/comment/14237089:

Richard Dawkins is his own religion.

Edit: also, funnily enough, it turns out that Dawkins does claim to be “near certain,” not “certain.” That was news to me, given his reputation!

That’s relevant because it puts a finer point on just how fervent the belief needs to be to count as “strong atheism.”

Source:

In The God Delusion, Dawkins describes people for whom the probability of the existence of God is between “very high” and “very low” as “agnostic” and reserves the term “strong atheist” for those who claim to know there is no God. He categorizes himself as a “de facto atheist” but not a “strong atheist” on this scale.

Well, GA is employment at will so, unless there’s some special law for judges I don’t know about, I’m guessing the ‘rejection’ is more symbolic than anything.

“At-will employment” just means they’re kneecapping the unions. It doesn’t mean an individual’s job can’t be governed by an actual negotiated contract with terms different from “either party may end the agreement at any time for any reason without prior notice;” that’s merely the default when no such contract exists. Actors, for example, often have actual employment contracts so they can’t just abandon their portrayal of a recurring character without consequences.

I don’t know if there are special employment terms for elected judges (or elected officials in general) in GA either, but I don’t know that it would necessarily require a “law” (as opposed to administrative rule or even just convention) and I’m guessing I think it’s more likely than you do.

How is it any different than claiming with near certainty that leprechauns aren’t real?

Does Richard fucking Dawkins claim to be “near certain?”