I think it’s slightly more nuanced than that:

“We must ONLY have free and fair elections! And since I’m dismantling the structure that ensures this, there can be no more elections!”

I agree with the main argument of what you’re saying. I’m sharing that I’d flag these ones as fascist-forward, not religion-to-the-extreme.

At the end of the day, people are people and you’ll get the worst of us rising to the top in any power structure. In the case of Christianity, moving from a Jewish sect to a formal empire-backing religion of its own may be the worst thing that ever happened to it. Slavery, the crusades, the inquisition, imperial colonialism, they’re all up there too.

Stoning gay men? That’s not Jesus-based, although it is definitely supported by some Christian sects even today. But that supports fundamentalist Judaism, and isn’t what Jesus taught (“whoever is without sin, cast the first stone”).

So the problem then comes down to: what do you do when you share an identity with people who proudly do vile things in the name of that identity?

The teachings of Jesus actually are useful in exploring the answer to that question. He wasn’t Christian, he was Jewish. And he never renounced Judaism, even though he denounced the actions of the contemporary leaders of the Jewish faith.

Nice to see a book on this; this story should not be forgotten, as it shows how fragile the entire system is — and with AI automation, it’s only becoming easier to pull such things off.

The disciples said, “See, Lord, here are two swords.” “That’s enough!” he replied.

There are two interpretations here of this passage. We seem to have come down on opposite sides.

The first is that he was calling them to take up literal swords to defend themselves, and that two swords would be enough for the purpose. The later rebuke of Peter was then about him using the sword to defend Jesus instead of himself.

The second, which makes more sense in my view based on how the gospel of Luke is laid out, is that Jesus was speaking figuratively, and when the disciples responded by producing actual swords, he rebuked them with “that’s enough!” This lines up structurally with his interaction with Peter in the garden as far as the literature goes. However, if taken as a recorded literal event, ignoring the structure that Luke used to frame the story, it does raise the question of: why did Jesus allow Peter to take one of the swords with them to the garden?

In my view, that doesn’t overcome the context of the events in Luke’s narrative or align with the events in Matthew, Mark or John, but I can see why others could use it to defend their position — Constantine certainly did; the early church did not.

They also stay afloat via dual citizenship — it’s often Israeli citizens who live in other countries who give them money.

Depends on where you live; a high school education in some places just means you know how to show up semi-regularly and deal with conflict.

These days it’s not until you go into trades or higher education that some standard level of competency is evaluated. Despite the fact that there are some kids in high school who know significantly more than I do about political science.

You seem to think he can’t shift the goalposts to whatever is expedient for his current thought.

What the last 10 years should have taught us is that nothing he says holds any integrity with anything he’s said prior.

No, he didn’t — at least not in any Biblically recorded passage. And the one time one of his apostles took his metaphors literally and wielded a sword, he was chastised for it.

There’s nothing by Jesus in the Bible stating that a person should defend themselves. There is, however, a command that if someone demands your cloak, to give them your tunic as well, and as far as you are able, to be at peace with those around you.

All the “fight in the name of Christianity” stuff is from Constantine and later.

I run my own, so data at rest is encrypted and the transport layer is TLS encrypted; there’s no data layer encryption option that I can see through.

Thing is, governments aren’t making age a condition; they’re making identity verification a condition. Age is just the excuse.

If I ever see an ICE vehicle in my neighbourhood, I’m calling the police. Not only do they have no standing here, but would be breaking a number of federal and provincial laws.

I INVOKE my right to sit next to Shakira!

Doesn’t NextCloud fall under this? They offer professional cloud services if you don’t want to stand up your own instance — that’s how they make their money.

So there’s actually people who aren’t Israeli citizens giving money to AIPAC?

Doesn’t Shakira use a private jet?

“Christian extremists” always leaves a bad taste in my mouth. A real Christian extremist would be giving away everything they owned and responding to all violence with pacifism. I think Christofascism usually fits better.

Aren’t donations by AIPAC really foreign interference?

Wait. Wildfires are acts of God. Is Trump saying he’s against God blanketing the US?

Did you look up the policy around increasing salaries? Because I can guarantee you there’s a policy for civil servants that either pegs salaries to inflation or pegs it to comparable wages in similar positions.

So the people who he hired went to apply existing policy, and he said “no.” And they said “OK.”

All seems perfectly reasonable to me. Salaries need to keep up with inflation when there’s no disposable income. At his level, there’s already plenty of disposable income, and he’s independently wealthy.

Here’s the text my phone extracted from that image:

FUCK THE POUXCE

What does this say?

It says “THIN BLUE LINE.”

The word BLUE is split between the second and third lines:

THIN

BLU

ELINE

•••