commie

You're taking this way too seriously. We're all safe here. The point of not saying anything is to avoid pointless answers. So if you're going to say anything of the sort, best wait until answers won't happen.

Yes. Take any balance and remove a big piece, what happens to that balance? US hegemony is the reason for specific potential conflicts you talked about. You are also overlooking nukes. Japan would need a military if it wasn't a US protectorate for instance but this thankfully isn't 1914 and it doesn't need its own imperialist machine. All it needs is the stuff France has been selling. Now we've heard it all.

Proper proofs are often beautiful. Trying to prove something when you have no proof though... that's just not a good look. You can never tell when people over react. Don't bother trying. You can ask reasonably clueful third parties if they figure the reactors are full of shit (a second opinion is always welcome) but I wouldn't bother anyone with it when it's clear they haven't even paid attention to what you said (for instance they may have gone off on a tangent based on a keyword). As to ugliness, well... I don't know how you do it but people usually make a show of looking at their creations from different angles. Sometimes they fuss with the light as well or compare their stuff to respected works. Ultimately you'll be the judge but there are rash judgements and informed judgements. Search engines may reveal the unsuspected baggage of a word for instance. But the basic technique is always going to be: pause, look, feel.

You've been exposed to pseudo-spiritual silliness. Closed system aren't intrinsically part of the law which was originally formulated without reference to such. Closed systems are simply a useful theoretical tool. You may have heard the spherical cow joke. Wherever the word "exist" goes, confusion seems to arise in its wake. There is at best only one system that's not made up and it appears not to be closed. Systems are not waiting somewhere out there for people to stumble upon them and discover their properties. People imagine systems with arbitrary limits in order to come up with predictions and inventions. In pseudo-spiritual terms, the theoretical properties of a closed system can guide imagination towards useful dualities.

We weren't talking about wearing masks.

Oblivious to the pla... er, pandemic.

Yeah, it's almost like something swept over the country and affected his judgement. Something like a... plague? Sorry but I can't stop myself.

Out of context, I don't understand what "Trump is evil" is supposed to be pointing at, other than a value judgment. And you shouldn't react to a value judgment with "no he is not" or "yes he is".

Communists are indeed the only ones who truly understand conservative Christians.

The trouble of course is with statements involving abstractions. If there was any doubt about what a bus is in the context of 5PM (or how to use a clock for that matter), it would be easy to dispel. After living in a society for a while, you get these things. But WTF does "language is relative" mean out of context? And in this forum, people very often talk abstractions... sometimes quite obliviously I'm sorry to say.

Malfeasance aside, the problem is that you can't have fully secret ballots and verify the integrity of the count at the same time. There is an argument for renouncing the secrecy of the ballot considering mail-in ballots are becoming more common anyway. But for the foreseeable future, no one will ever know what happened exactly in every precinct. Obviously you can't know the number of votes which have not been counted at all. Sometimes the number of disqualified votes will be published but such numbers can rarely be trusted because independent verification is too often impossible, illegal or simply tedious. The legal challenges are public at least (though the number of affected votes might be uncertain). Making sense of this mess would be a full time job. I suppose we might call that journalism. Here's a taster of the best-documented least contentious stuff: https://fivethirtyeight.com/live-blog/trump-biden-votes/

I'd wager your narrative is at variance with the happening. Obviously you don't know that. Nor do you know anything about this "collective ego backlash". There are many differences between righteousness and arrogance but the most pertinent one I suppose is that living righteousness is beautiful. Challenging people's worldviews isn't that easy. And you don't know it'd be hard on them if you actually did. You're welcome to challenge mine for instance... but if I "lash out", instead of theorizing a successful challenge and some kind of backlash, do take a moment to consider the possibility you might have said something ugly.

No, I didn't. You're letting your mind run away with the silverware.

That is precisely the problem. Did I say otherwise? I don't want my brains to fall out when I bend over.

Give Christians an inch and that's what you get... Nice to hear there are generous people in Czechia.

Tea is a higher priority than truth. You're projecting. Such a sad display too... have no you joy? And WTF is that "bro" about? Mind your dirty, wet tongue!

I don't know that my "reality" has any "ground" or feels like anything other than my state of consciousness. 4, 5b and 7 are ridiculous. I don't need to disprove them, only laugh them off. Still, I can easily entertain 5b. 7, not so much (in part because it wouldn't be hard to disprove unless that being was incorporeal). As to the other ideas, what's the problem with them exactly? You only have to act as if these ideas were unfounded or simply to ignore them because you've got better things to do than ponder them. And there are so many ideas we don't take seriously in order to live our lives...

Violent people can be arrested or otherwise neutralized. We know how it works because terrorist campaigns have been brought to a halt successfully. This is not only much more effective at protecting people from violence than suppressing speech, it's made easier when the relevant communities are comfortable speaking. What about [insert off-topic far-right conspiracy theory]? I've had an elected official of the "socialist party" talk this shit (a less crazy version, granted) to me. The very same also thought that Jews working in the WTC were warned before 9/11 somehow.

Resolving the issue is quite simple. You'll certainly have noticed that there isn't much explicit pornography on display in France (or elsewhere). Yet it's not banned in most places (even though some laws against it are still on the books here and there). There you go: mostly free speech and most easily-disturbed people aren't riled up for no good reason. The problem in France is simply that certain centrist or right-wing politicians are playing identity politics, and have been doing so for quite some time. It's not a freedom of speech issue. That is, until the speech offends you or some powerful group... I'm into freedom of speech. This gets threads locked in forums (at best). I've met very few others who actually are into freedom of speech.

Some of the OT comes from a polytheist context and I can't read Hebrew but I suppose the plural could also be intended to distinguish between heavenly beings and humans. Even though my ancient Greek is worse than terrible, I can read a few related languages so I guess I could try to take a look at the LXX to see what it says exactly if there was no expert take on the Internet (which would be surprising). Did you try to look this up? The NT like the OT is a collection of texts, hence made up in a sense. The NT has many authors but IIRC much of the Roman Bible's OT was written by (or under the direction of) Saint Jerome based in part of lost sources. But it was all pretty closely based on a then extant tradition, hence not made up in another sense.

You probably don't care about my thoughts but since no one else answered... I don't care about this hypocritical stuff about fundamental rights and whatnot. There's an obvious technical solution anyway: make a law almost everyone violates or a law about going to unregistered private parties and have a judge issue warrants immediately on request. Cops need to enter people's homes based on mere suspicion to deal with DV, child abuse and such effectively. I find your comparison to 1984 ludicrous. The larger issue is one of proportionality I think: why persecute people for meeting in their homes while people with non-essential jobs are allowed to meet at work? And I think we both know the answer to that question...

Jesus was Jewish and the OT was a large part of what the earliest Christians would have believed. So it's a useful sourcebook for Christians. It's as simple as that. The only trouble was: what to include or exclude from the collection? Some of the stuff in the NT is only tangentially related to Jesus as well.

These votes are far from locked in, though some of them are as good as locked in. Some are the object of legal challenges and more will be. Some of the votes will no doubt be dumped without being counted (this is usually the case) and more will be counted wrong or disqualified (sometimes fraudulently or by abusing regulations). These are usually very state/locale-specific issues, though Washington might get involved. People will no doubt try to get the SCOTUS involved at some point. Even if one of the presidential campaigns concedes, there are many other positions at stake...

Now tell her how spiritually underdeveloped her mom is!

Whatever you want it to be. Let your mind imagine things without being prompted by light, touch or sound. You can then make up events or whole stories about these things, like there are in your memory or in your dreams.