It has some application in technical writing, data transformation and querying/summarization but it is definitely being oversold.

"Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” Mk 12:17

Saints offer prayers to God. If you’ve ever asked someone to pray for you then you have done the same thing that the Orthodox do when they venerate an icon. No one is replacing God with Saints. Saints are only Saints because of Christs work in their life.

It’s funny hearing a Protestant make sweeping claims about what is or is not true Christianity.

Bingo

Lol did you even look at the poll that we’re all commenting on? Clearly people are over the immigration bullshit across the board.

Illegal entry should defacto prevent residency. We have to put a stop to it. This is historic levels of uncontrolled migration.

I have empathy. It’s just not expressed in the way you want it to be. Ultimately this is a humanitarian problem that shouldn’t exist but has snowballed into a massive quagmire that will require significant investment and policy changes. The most empathetic thing for the immigrant is to prevent illegal entry. If they have asylum requests they can come in through a port of entry. If someone comes in illegally there should be consequences since many immigrants did the lawful thing. Empathy is impossible with chaos. You have no idea who these people are or why they are coming. Many of these people are human trafficked and their families are under threat of narcos back home. The citizens of this country also deserve to be protected from unknown millions.

I can’t go to Ecuador and just live there. I’ll get kicked out.

Are you 14?

What’s your point?

I gave you my criteria. Whatever editorializing you want to add to it is your business.

Yeah they should wait to be processed. Currently they are apprehended and then let loose to go live in America while awaiting a court date they will probably not show up for.

Illegal immigrants should be first informed, second prevented from entering and third detained if they still decide to enter. They are law breakers by merely being in the United States without entering via port-of-entry or overstaying a visa. It shouldnt be dehumanizing but it must be manned and they shouldnt be allowed to leave. We have 23 million complete randos in this country. It’s neither okay nor sustainable and they should be sent back. Frankly if it is not profitable to be an illegal immigrant then they will stop coming (at least in such numbers). Ultimately the solution is prevention but no one wants to do anything about that be it physical barrier, more border guards or prosecution of American businesses. There is no kumbaya solution to this problem.

this whole debate comes down to a definition of when a fertilised egg becomes a live human

Why? People dont usually abort things that are dead and if it’s not human then there’s no need for an abortion. I reject the false equivalency objection that somehow a human embryo is not “human” the same way I reject that a toddler is somehow less human than an adult.

This “live human” stipulation is a pilpul fabrication meant to inject moral ambiguity. This allows abortion to be morally justified as an acceptable practice at least up until some arbitrary stage of development (even though it’s clear that pregnancy, barring complication, means a baby is on the way.)

You will never get consensus on your “live human” criteria. That is by design.

I posit instead that the crux of this debate comes down to the sanctity of life and personal responsibility. Calling me cruel for “denying care” is odd considering I’m arguing to prevent the termination of healthy pregnancies conceived with full consent and knowledge of the man and woman involved. A pregnancy isn’t a “risk ending badly” it’s a blessing and a responsibility (for both woman AND man).

To break it down simply – babies come from sex. More specifically they come from the product of sucessful egg-sperm fertilization (e.g. the early stage embryo and fetuses that are aborted by the millions each year) This occurs in the womb which is naturally equipped for this process. It’s pretty clear what is going on.

Determining termination based on some level of cognizance is an arbitrary standard and frankly one that opens the door for other judgements that are only limited by imagination, rhetoric and charisma.

At what point does this evolve into screening fetuses, altering genomes and treating early human development like some science experiment. Aldous Huxley, a eugenicist, explores this future in his novel Brave New World.

“Stage-of-development” is a flawed argument because it presupposes that some qualifications must be met before an embryo or fetus reaches a status of personhoood when in reality the "clump of cells " has all the genetic instructions it requires to proceed through all stages of development at conception. Entertaining the idea that it somehow matters less because it is smaller, less developed, dependent on the mother etc is the pilpul I was talking about. If it wasn’t a human then an abortion wouldn’t be necessary because a dog, bird or fish embryo would die immediately.

It is not like contraception (e.g. a condom). A gamete on it’s own will never develop into a human under any circumstances.

There can also be devastating psychological fallout from not getting an abortion, which would be why many people believe it should be a choice that the people involved get to make about themselves, rather than forcing it on them.

We are talking about people (man and woman) who decide to have sex and don’t want to deal with the logical, predictable outcome. No one is forcing them to do anything. They have created this situation for themselves. It’s that simple. The rest is just mental gymnastics for them not taking responsibility for their actions.

The only intellectually and morally honest argument for abortion is “I don’t care”.

Abortion should be legal in all cases

Respectfully I disagree. If one grants that abortion should be legal for rape/incest/LOTM (~1%) then it comes down to the other 99% which is what both sides actually care about. At this point the conversation shifts to personal liberty, bodily autonomy, stage-of-development or, in the case of Roe v. Wade, privacy. While there is some clever pilpul regarding ethics and/or the “dilemma” an unexpected pregnancy creates, in the overwhelming majority of cases the abortion decision comes down to convenience. Convenience meaning the prevention of struggle. Having to alter ones life or career to acommodate the needs of a(nother) child. It’s no secret that sex causes pregnancy however many people feel they shouldnt have to deal with the consequences (women AND men). Human life is the most precious thing on earth which means it needs to be treated with the utmost care from conception to repose.

Abortion creates a culture of death. Assisted suicides would almost certainly not be a thing if abortion wasn’t normalized first. It’s no surprise that abortion traces its modern roots to the eugenics movement.

Furthermore something that is rarely discussed is the psychological fallout from abortion. It can be devastating for both women and men.

patriot act and seeing the continuation of right wing authoritarianism

The Patriot Act was an overwhelmingly bipartisan bill.

‘Lol’ Three simple characters. “FLOSS software? Ridiculous. So DUMB.” He says to himself. Finally a single tap and his snarky comment begins it’s instantaneous travail through countless GPL licensed unix systems to reach his victim - an ignorant commenter on an open-source, federated lemmy instance.

I don’t like it and wouldn’t buy an HP as my next printer for software reasons alone. I’d suggest supporting another company or getting a used HP for free or next to nothing and buying refilled cartridges from aliexpress or amazon for 30-40% of what HP charges (this is what I do). It’s a shitty practice but it doesn’t make me want to get daddy government involved.

“Right to Repair” is different. If I buy a printer and the ink chassis breaks and I’m capable of sourcing a part and fixing it myself then I have a right to do that on my own because it’s mine.

Edit: As an aside if we explanded my initial proposal to encompass FLOSS hardware as well as software this wouldn’t be a problem because companies would be tripping over themselves for the government contracts.