Given that child sex crimes were, in the past, largely a crime committed by people that were living in poverty, probably not. It’s more likely that you get to a certain point of fame and money and think you can get away with it since you have so many people telling you ‘yes’ all the time. (This was–supposedly, purportedly–one of the reasons that nobility would have a jester; they needed someone to make fun of them so they weren’t completely detached from reality.)

Well, TBF it’s hard to maximize profit when you’re head is in a basket in front of the guillotine, sooooooooo I guess they need to figure shit out before then?

Women have been responsible for most of the domestic labor throughout history. Over the last 100 years or so, economies have changed so that women were first able to work outside of the home, then expected to work outside the home, and now need to work outside of the home. (E.g., a single-income household can’t pay the minimum bills in most places in the US.)

But doing labor outside the home means that labor can’t be done inside the home, because time is a finite resource; if you’re working 40 hours a week (plus commuting time), that’s 40 hours you don’t have for raising a family. That makes raising a family significantly more difficult.

The solution is to change the structure of the economy so that it’s entirely reasonably possible to raise a family on a single income without living in grinding poverty.

While mass-shooting deaths account for just 1 percent of firearm fatalities, they play an outsize role in how safe Americans are feeling, Murthy said.

Yeah, no shit. And this is even worse when you consider that the overwhelming majority of mass shootings–which are defined by the gov’t as four or more people shot (not necessarily killed), not including the shooter–are gang violence or ordinary crime (robbery, etc.). So the kind of mass shootings that people worry about are, statistically speaking, relative to the number of people that live in the US, *very, very rare. When you look at the kind of targeted, mass-casualty events that happen annually in the US, you’re looking at odds that are similar to winning a jackpot in the lottery.

It’s not that mass shootings are realistically a problem that most people will have to face, but people freak out about them because they’re on the news all the time–if it bleeds, it leads–and because it feels more random than, say, a serious car accident. Despite serious car accidents being more common by multiple orders of magnitude.

It’s fundamentally a perception issue.

“Gender critical” is a dogwhistle for anti-trans. Dawkins falls squarely into that camp, of questioning everything that trans people, and experts on the subject have to say. The problem with being anti-trans–or, one of the problems–is that by its nature it assumes that there’s some kind of sex role in society. E.g., women are A, B, C, and men are X, Y, Z, and you can’t move between them. That kind of gender-essentialism is fundamentally socially regressive. Dawkins is also quite significantly culturally Christian, and Islamophobic, e.g., he is entirely critical of Islam both as a religion and as what he perceives to be a culture, but doesn’t direct the same types of criticism towards the Anglican church that he grew up surrounded by.

how you identify/feel is a different matter in many people’s eyes.

The way I see it, it’s just not my business. The only time that someone else’s gender identity is going to matter to me is if I’m potentially interested in dating them. They’re not harming people, they’re not ‘taking’ anything away from cis-women (or cis-men, for that matter), so why should it be my business what they feel they need to do with their body in order to feel comfortable in their own skin? I came across this a few weeks back, and it really drove that home to me.

But does that alone make him Right Wing now?

It’s a spectrum, like all things. You can be pro-science, but also still have a very socially conservative view on the ‘right’ place for people in society, or still maintain false beliefs about the ‘rightness’ of capitalism, imperialism, and so on. And scientists are still human, and prone to the same cognitive biases as everyone else.

Being right wing doesn’t necessarily mean being religious. Being left wing doesn’t necessarily mean being atheist. Yes, that’s more often true than not, but I think part of that is that the right in general uses an appeal to tradition–which includes religious practices–as part of their package. But, on the other hand, Jesus, as depicted in the 4 gospels and the early Christian church, would have been very comfortable to socialists, as would the teachings on tolerance.

In re: podcasts, the only explicitly atheist one that I still listen to is The Friendly Atheist. I find Jess to be annoyingly hyperbolic most of the time, and she frequently makes wildly overbroad statements, but Hemant Mehta is pretty measured overall. Mostly I listen to politics (FiveThirtyEight), 2A podcasts (A Better Way 2A, the irregular Tiger Bloc Podcast, Guns Guide To Liberals, Practical Shooting After Dark), a couple of ex-Mormon podcasts (Mormon Stories is great if you love really, really long form interviews), You Are Not So Smart, sometimes BtB, Cool People Who Did Cool Things, a couple others.

I agree with all of this. At the same time, I think that, in most cases, people should allow their body to adapt to heat, if they are healthy enough to do so. Most people can learn to be comfortable in higher heat than they believe, although some people have medical conditions that will make them more susceptible to heat exhaustion and heat stroke. If you can get by without it, you should. If you’re at risk by not using it, don’t feel guilty.

(FWIW, my office only has a/c because I have a very, very large printer in here, and it tends to have head strikes and scrap prints out if there’s no climate control. But since I’m not printing at the moment, the current temp in here is 82F.)

You are confusing actual results with people being on the right side of a conflict.

No, I’m not. The NRA is not on the right side; they’re on the side of authoritarians. They’re on the side of the boot that is kicking you in the face. They’re on the side of the cops that will be the ones disarming people, and on the side of the christian nationalists that want to take guns from everyone but white evangelical christians. The NRA does not believe that the second amendment exists for ALL people, regardless of race, religion, age, disability, sex, gender identity, or sexual orientation, and they’ve never even tried to really conceal that. That’s why they are silent when someone like Filandro Castile is murdered by a cop.

When the NRA fixes it’s own shit so that, as an organization, they truly believe that 2A rights exist for everyone, and are willing to treat the disarming of any group as a crime, then we can talk. But that’s not who they are now, and it’s not likely that this is who they will be at any time in the future, since they’ve made it nearly impossible for grassroots change to happen within the org.

…Have you been paying attention to Dawkins in the last decade? The dude is decidedly anti-trans, anti-woke. Harris has been on the side of Republican foreign policy for decades, even if he’s more socially permissive. Shermer is the same kind of anti-LGBTQ anti-woke as Dawkins.

On top of that, as we experience higher temperatures, many people also crank up their air conditioners—which emit more heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

This is not correct. Air conditioning units do not ‘emit more […] greenhouse gases’. Air conditioners use a refrigerant–usually R134a–which does have a high global warming potential (GWP) compared to methane or CO2, but that refrigerant is in a closed loop; it’s not going anywhere unless the system is damaged. Most a/c failures aren’t from refrigerant leaking out of the system, and the system no longer being able to effectively transfer heat, but from the compressor motor failing. When the compressor fails, in most cases you can evacuate the refrigerant, replace the broken part, and then recharge the system. (The fact that they can be repaired doesn’t mean that they usually are repaired. Which is shitty.)

What is true is that a/c units emit heat themselves. An air conditioner moves heat from inside a space to outside of that space; in the process of doing so, the a/c unit itself is creating an additional small amount of heat from the function of the compressor motor, electronics, etc.

Beyond that, most electricity that’s used to run a/c systems–and every other electrical device–is produced from burning fossil fuels. So if there’s more demand for electricity–such as from a heat dome that has everyone running their a/c full-time–then yes, more CO2 is going to get pumped out into the atmosphere. But if your electricity is coming from sources that are largely emissions-free, like solar, wind, or hydro, then air conditioning is a negligible source of heat.

tl;dr - don’t feel bad about using your a/c when heat rises to dangerous levels; agitate at a local, state, and national level for renewable, carbon-neutral ways of generating electricity, and for more efficient use of electricity.

So, here’s the thing.

He shouldn’t have gone there. Being there, being armed, there to protect property, was taken to be provocative by the people that were protesting cops shooting an unarmed man.

But the narrative that we got in the news wasn’t how things actually went down. The first person confronted him and tried to grab his rifle when he wasn’t threatening anyone. The second person that was shot had just chased Rittenhouse down and struck him with a skateboard. The third person was pointing a pistol at Rittenhouse when he was shot in the arm. Source.

Given that he was not directly threatening anyone there, it was a clear-cut case of self-defense. Yeah, I don’t like it that a shitty person walks away, but he walked because he wasn’t guilty of a crime in defending himself. Is he still a right-wing shitstain that’s supposedly too dumb to get into the military? Yeah. But self-defense is a right for everyone.

That’s $62,000 annually. The median personal income in the US as of 2022 was $40,480, which means that’s about 50% above the median.

Not sure what you’re on that you don’t think that’s a pretty decent individual income.

Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Michael Shermer.

All prominent atheists, all decidedly right-wing. If you want to include dead atheists, then I’d also say Christopher Hitchens was decidedly right wing on a lot of issues.

The NRA hasn’t done jack shit in decades. As I said, the NRA did their level best to kill Heller v. D.C. before it even got off the ground, and that was the single most important 2A win in the last 50 years.

Don’t give me that bullshit about them being the line between the US and tyranny, when they won’t even speak up against tyranny when cops murder legally armed citizens.

So you’re saying my choices are either to side with fascists that want to take rights from people, or fascists that want to take rights from different people?

And no, it’s not a zero-sum game. My parents were life-long Republicans. They switched in the 2016 election, and have been voting mostly Democratic since then. I was raised in a deeply conservative religion, and was raised to be homophobic; I have changed, because I learned differently. The game, as you say, isn’t zero-sum; it’s persuasion. If you aren’t being persuasive, then you need to find better ways of reaching people, and yelling and telling them they’re terrible ain’t doing it. You certainly don’t win with circular firing squads.

His attorney probably should have raised that objection in the first place. He should have objected based on the phone not being material to the search of the car. But if he didn’t raise the objection correctly during the initial trial, then he can’t raise the objection on the appeal either.

A court, however, can force you to give up a password or hold you in contempt (which is essentially the rubber hose option)

That remains to be seen; I don’t think that there’s ever been a definitive ruling on this in the US. One real problem is that they would have to be able to prove that you knew the password, and that can be a real problem. I have an old Tails drive; it’s been years since I used it, and I have no idea what the password is anymore. Shit, I sometimes have a brain fart and can’t remember the passphrase for my password manager, and I use that a lot.

the only beneficent quality of republicans is supporting the NRA,

Look, I like guns far, far more than most people, but I draw the line at the NRA, and Wayne LaPierre’s suit-fetish. Most people that work on 2A issues at a local level will tell you that the NRA will swoop in after a deal has already been made, and fuck everything up. If you look at the history of Heller v. D.C., you’ll find that the NRA tried to kill the suit before it even got off the ground, because they were afraid it would hurt their funding.

If you want to support 2A causes, the Firearms Policy Coalition is on of the few right now that’s both effective, and appears to avoid other ‘culture wars’ (e.g., “anti-wokeism”) nonsense. At a non-policy level, the various John Brown Gun Clubs are doing good work, the Liberal Gun Club is helping create a space for people that are both pro-gun and generally identify as left of center, and the SRA is pretty okay once you get past the tankies.

It’s even weirder because Michigan is purple-trending-blue. I’m surprised that it’s not more blue, considering how much a part labor unions played in building the industrial base that used to exist in the urban areas. So I don’t know how they think that this is gonna “own teh libz” when they’ve already lost the state. Their own party is in tatters; it’s been run by someone so extreme in the state that no one was donating money to them.

And who, exactly, defines “degenerate”? Because I know there are quite a lot of people that would define “degenerate” as anyone that is non-Christian, LGBTQ+ or LGBTQ-affirming, or non-“white” (however they’re currently defining “whiteness”).

The only way you deny these so-called degenerates a say in society is by intentionally disenfranchising them, in much the same way that Republicans have made an effort to deny non-white people a say in society through gerrymandering and voter-ID laws. (Or, earlier, through “literacy tests” and the like, or simply murdering people that tried to get black people registered to vote.)

Doesn’t seem to be. Eugene Stoner lived in Florida and California. Armalite–and later Colt–aren’t based in Michigan.