I’m a Satanist. I would be fine dating an atheist, depending on their morals and ethics. I would probably be okay dating someone that was agnostic, since technically most atheists are agnostics. I could date most reform Jews, since for most of them it’s a cultural religion, rather than a literal one.

I would not be able to date anyone that sincerely believed in a supernatural deity, because I would not be able to respect them, or trust any of their conclusions.

Nah, they’re cool. Anyone that tells the manosphere to fuck all the way off is cool by me.

Prairie and Craftsman Bungalows. Unfortunately, I don’t think that either is a particularly energy efficient design.

I have one. I hated the stock skin. I like having the apps I use regularly groups together by purpose on my home screen so I can get to them quickly. I immediately re-skinned it.

Honestly, my advice, unpopular as it might be, is that unless you plan on riding a motorcycle you should probably get an automatic transmission car instead of learning on a manual transmission. Manual transmissions–in the US, anyways–are largely relegated to performance vehicles where people want them. But the hard truth is that automatic transmissions do a better job at driving efficiently and keeping the engine at a safe and ideal load than any driver with a manual. And it’s a lot less hassle for most of the driving that people tend to actually do. For instance, it’s uncommon to have a cruise control on a manual transmission car, which makes long drives more tiring, and stop-and-go traffic puts less wear on an automatic transmission.

If you plan on riding a motorcycle though, you must learn to use a clutch, because all non-electric motorcycles use a clutch (usually a wet clutch, but Ducati uses a dry clutch); manual transmissions are lighter and more compact, and weight matters a lot on a motorcycle.

I say this as someone that learned to drive on manual transmissions, and exclusively had cars with manual transmissions up through about 2022.

Learn to shift based off the sound of the engine, dont stare at the tachometer.

Do not do this.

Every engine has a different redline. The redline is based mostly on piston mass, which doesn’t necessarily correlate directly to engine displacement, given that it’s common to have 4, 6, or 8 cylinders in a car. If you’re shifting primarily based on engine sound, you can be shifting too low in one car, and then too high in another. The tachometer is a much more reliable way of learning where you should shift in any given vehicle.

Also, constantly running your car in the maximum power band–which tends to be close to the redline–probably isn’t great for it.

I’m guess that you don’t live in the US? Almost all cars in the US–whether training vehicles or not–are gasoline, and it’s mostly larger pickup trucks that are diesel. VW is one of the few companies that sells consumer cars that are diesel, and I’m not sure that they do anymore, not after there was that huge scandal about intentionally cheating EPA emissions standards with their diesel cars a decade back.

Thought I could/should work through discomfort and then pain at the gym, supersetting overhead push-presses and triceps dips. LOL, nope, gave myself a labral tear and tore my supraspinatus. My shoulder now has an unpleasant popping feeling + significantly less strength when I’m doing anything like a bench press with my elbows properly tucked; I’ll likely never be able to do narrow grip bench press or triceps dips again.

Why was this dumb? Because I was a personal trainer, and I fucking know better than to try and push through pain. But I was trying to get back into lifting seriously after losing a lot of time to the pandemic.

Well, shit. I hadn’t known about Inquisition. I think the last time I saw them was something like 2016? At least I only have the one t-shirt. :(

I haven’t heard anything about Agalloch; what’s going on there?

Jesus fuck. You argue that the tyranny of the majority doesn’t exist, and when I prove that it does, with examples, you block. You can’t even cite anything to justify your position.

What the shit, my dude.

You think you’re doing that. But are you? Or are things happening below the threshold of your consciousness, and your conscious brain thinks that it’s the one running the show? Consciousness would be like the toddler with the toy steering wheel that thinks it’s driving the car.

You are arguing in favor of being a slave with no rights because JKR paid to have a law passed.

No, what I specifically said was that we shouldn’t follow the will of the majority in all things, because the majority can and does act in tyrannical ways. Meanwhile, you’re insisting that letting everyone always vote on every single thing would somehow result in a utopia.

Here’s the thing: I live in the rural south. Our local high school has one transgender student. The superintendent consulted with an attorney, and then let the student us the bathroom of the gender that they identify with. The community as a whole fucking lost their minds. The school board held a public meeting about it where they explained why they took the steps they did, and then they let community members speak. In a town of 5k people, there were over 500 people attending. They cut off comments after three hours. It was roughly 10:1 against treating this poor girl like a girl.

If they’d taken a vote that very day, she would have been run out of town on a rail covered in tar and feathers, because the town is full of bigoted evangelical christians. But you think that people should always get to vote on everything, even when they have zero real knowledge about the subject? That’s absolute nonsense.

The places in then world where people vote on policy are the objectively safest for trans people.

Okay, and right fucking now those countries are voting for people that have explicitly told them that they’re going to clamp down on trans rights, and then those people are doing it. So the countries where people vote are becoming less safe for trans people, even if it’s still safer than being transgender in, say, Iran.

If the unconscious mind is making the decisions prior to cognition about the thing, how could our will alone affect it? It seems more likely that things outside of our direct control are changing how we are acting, and then the conscious part of ourselves creates the reason that we acted in a specific way.

No. Last I knew, PET (?) scans appear to indicate that decisions are reached by your unconscious mind before they’re made by your conscious mind; the implication is that what you believe is you making a choice is actually you rationalizing a choice that’s been made through processes that you can’t directly see or affect. IF that’s correct, then people are quite deterministic, as long as you know all of the inputs.

But on a practical, day-to-day basis, calling it ‘free will’ is a convenient fiction or shorthand. While free will may not exist, we largely believe that it does, and our perception of that in turn shapes our perception of reality. So it ends up not really mattering, strictly speaking.

First: I gave you numbers for the US, so you’re pivoting to the UK in order to avoid addressing the salient point. But okay, here are some UK numbers. The numbers weren’t great to start, and they’ve been getting worse; people in the UK may be okay with allowing adults to get gender-affirming care, but they’re not okay with the NHS paying for it, and they broadly opposed gender-affirming care for minors. And paying for your own health care in the UK ain’t exactly cheap.

If the plurality of people are broadly unsupportive of transgender equality (it’s not a strict majority because there is a percentage of people that don’t have an opinion), then the MPs that voted against transgender equality were doing what their constituents wanted.

If you have hard data showing that this the polling on this is incorrect, now is a great time to present it.

And yes, all of the scientific data that’s credible demonstrates that trans people fare better with social acceptance, with access to gender-affirming care, when they aren’t discriminated against. But that doesn’t significantly sway public opinion on the matter. The majority of people that have an opinion on the matter as simply wrong.

Okay, people in the US generally didn’t though. How is the information going to get to them, when mail took months, phone calls were not realistically possible, and telegraphs were incredibly expensive? Unless it’s getting reported by the major news outlets, the majority of people in the US simply didn’t have access to that information. Given the propaganda that was coming from both sides at the time, reports might not have even been very believable to the average citizen.

Yeah, no, it’s not. Multiple polls, from multiple different polling firms, shows that people broadly oppose things like allowing minors to have gender-affirming care, or allowing equal participation in gendered sports (e.g., having transwomen compete in women’s divisions). It doesn’t matter what the political leanings of the polling firm are. This is why Republican attacks on Dems regarding trans rights were so effective in the election. It’s irrelevant that Dems are on the morally right side, because the majority supports the immoral position. Here’s one source for you; raw data is here.

Under a direct democracy, transgender people would absolutely lose rights in the states that now protect them. 40 years ago gay people would have had it even worse under a direct democracy.

Generally okay, but they shouldn’t necessarily do the will of the people, when the will of the people is wrong. (Which is, BTW, an objectively slippery slope as well.) We can look at history and see that Bernie Sanders in the US has consistently been working for the LGBTQ+ people to have the same rights as cis- and het- people, even when it was wildly, deeply unpopular. (Which I’m old enough to remember; there used to be strong public sentiment against allowing people that were LGBTQ+ to be teachers.)

A good leader, IMO, is someone that is intellectually curious and honest, willing to change their beliefs when given new information, is able to incorporate new information appropriately into their worldview, and knows people that has the expertise they lack in order to get good direction. E.g., I don’t expect all leaders to be experts in every bit of policy, but I do expect them to find people that understand the things being legislated, and can evaluate options as objectively as is reasonably possible.

But.

No system is infallible. Every system can be broken and abused, or function outside the intended parameters. The goal, IMO, should be to create systems that are highly resistant to being broken or abused, while still trying to serve the people as a whole effectively.

That’s an incredibly stupid take, esp. since RIGHT FUCKING NOW the majority of people in the US and UK are opposed to transgender people having equal rights, and it wasn’t until less than 10 years ago that the majority thought that gay people should have the right to marry the person they chose. If you polled in Sweden, Denmark, et al., you’d probably find that the majority of people are opposed to Muslims immigrating to their country as well.

The tyranny of the majority is absolutely alive and well; what you’re talking about is a utopia, which is literally ‘no place’.

My basis is: read what i fucking said.

No single person can rationally have a thorough understanding of every single issue facing a country of 1M+ people. An engineer with expertise in electrical systems shouldn’t be expected to have a reasonable understanding of public health policy, and expecting people with no understanding of a <<thing>> to make good decisions about it is folly.