It's to be expected for Christians (et al); a vast majority have been taught at a young age that the perfect society is one where a benevolent god makes all the decisions and you just shut up and do as you're told. It was never The People's Republic of Heaven; it's the Kingdom of Heaven.

It's conceivable that one would be proud of their country for the actions their country takes, both domestic and/or world stage. Like I'm sure the people living in those Scandinavian where a vast majority of their country is healthy, happy, and even their criminals are treated with dignity and respect can be proud of how their country has turned out.

I don't think it's a common interpretation to feel self-directed pride due to one's country. Unless, maybe, you're the president or someone who makes actual decisions for the country.

It's mostly true, but not entirely. The data "on the internet" has to live somewhere. For instance, when you DM someone on a social media network-- would you consider that private? I assure you the content of those messages can be read by the website's admin-users.

If you're hosting your own non-social web service (like, personal cloud storage or something), then that is arguably private for you, but if you let someone else also use it, then it is not private for them, because you can almost certainly see their file content, having access to the server directly.

Encryption can throw all of this off; a service like Signal is private-- the admin-users of Signal can't see your messages. Generally speaking any service that warns you that all your data will be lost if you forget your password is probably private. If they can recover your data, they have access to your data.

Edit: Better word choices.

I feel like Spez doesn't give two tiny rat shits about anything but the fact that this counts as more engagement, which he can leverage to call Reddit more valuable.

It should be one giant fediverse ad.

It is trivial to sign up for a service when you want to watch something, and then cancel it when you don't, until there's something else you want to watch on the service. That is the benefit over cable.

Most people still treat it like a cable subscription: always on, even if they're not watching it.

Every day, new people start actually paying attention to politics. Don't assume that because we know that Boebert is a terrible person, that everyone knows that she's a terrible person.

Not to mention, people halfheartedly paying attention to politics seem to require near-constant reminders, or they forget when it comes time to cast a vote.

Long story short, this woman has real power over some people's lives, by the fact that she is their representative. We should never stop shining a light on the actions of people with real power. In my opinion, anyway.

I'll just leave this here:

Canon 2A.

An appearance of impropriety occurs when reasonable minds, with knowledge of all the relevant circumstances disclosed by a reasonable inquiry, would conclude that the judge’s honesty, integrity, impartiality, temperament, or fitness to serve as a judge is impaired. Public confidence in the judiciary is eroded by irresponsible or improper conduct by judges, including harassment and other inappropriate workplace behavior. A judge must avoid all impropriety and appearance of impropriety. This prohibition applies to both professional and personal conduct. A judge must expect to be the subject of constant public scrutiny and accept freely and willingly restrictions that might be viewed as burdensome by the ordinary citizen. Because it is not practicable to list all prohibited acts, the prohibition is necessarily cast in general terms that extend to conduct by judges that is harmful although not specifically mentioned in the Code. Actual improprieties under this standard include violations of law, court rules, or other specific provisions of this Code.

I think the "appearance of impropriety" ship has long sailed. She should recuse herself. She won't. Because it's more than just the appearance of impropriety.

I think if someone is getting a judge to officiate a wedding, they're not doing it in a ceremony, but in a perfunctory way, at the courthouse. They literally just want to make the union legal. Which it is, even in Texas, so this judge has no standing to refuse.

I thought this already came up when that woman in Kentucky refused to sign marriage licenses for gay people, and it was ruled that while she didn't have to personally sign it, if she refused it was up to her to find someone to do it instead of her.

They did complain a bit when google started pulling the answers to queries out of the sources and displaying them directly in the search results, which is probably what they're concerned with now-- google (et al) is no longer driving traffic to the sites, so the benefit to the sites is no longer there.

However, this still does not magically make it illegal. Intellectual Property laws have, imo, always been of dubious value to society-- especially in the last 100 years or so-- and we shouldn't just roll over when rightsholders make up a new "right" they think they should have.

As others have pointed out, this is just a natural-- and arguably desirable-- consequence of federation with a reddit-style format. However, I think the problem it causes could be somewhat mitigated by each platform implementing a feature to allow users to group magazines/communities manually-- and share them between instances and (ideally) platforms. Kind of like how Twitter did with "lists". (I think that's what they called them.)

Starving them out doesn't magically get them shelter.

You can't reason a person out of a stance they didn't reason themselves into.

For instance: How would you even begin to reason with someone that believes in demons? Where could any discussion even go if one side can waive away anything they don't agree with by claiming it is a trick from a demon?