Removed by mod

A pastor usually leads a Protestant church. Catholic churches are led by priests.

Confession of sins to (God though) a priest is a rite in the Catholic church, but not in Protestant churches. Protestant churches often encourage members to ask forgiveness for their sins directly to God through prayer.

There are more Catholics than protestants in the world, but there are more protestants than Catholics in the U.S. The type of Christianity most often associated with socially conservative Republican/MAGA primary voters is Protestant “evangelical” Christianity.

Evangelicals are a hardcore subset of Protestants who take the Bible literally. They’re sometimes called “Born-again Christians” because of their belief in the importance of personal conversion. That is, you’re not really a real Christian until, as an autonomous adult, you willingly choose to surrender yourself, mind body and soul, and devote your life to (your pastor’s teachings about) the teachings of Jesus.

Anyway, now I’ve done an eight-hours-later four-paragraph TED-talk riff on what is otherwise quite a fine and clever comment. I mean no offense and hope none is taken. I mostly just wanted to note that when Nikki Haley talks about “pastors,” she isn’t talking to Catholics; she’s talking directly to the GOP evangelical voter base.

Giant food stores in Mid-Atlantic US

What does that mean though, “anti-war party,” “anti-war politician”?

Did your “anti-war party” stop being so because they’d ended the war we were in? And if so, wasn’t that a good thing, for those with an “anti-war” outlook?

Back in the late 1930s, I’m pretty sure America’s “anti-war party” was mostly isolationists and some Nazi sympathizers. It was FDR, one of the most progressive Democrats ever elected to the office, who led the country to war back then.

If your entire political belief system is based on avoiding war at all costs, you deny yourself any real-world context in exchange for that purist ideology.

Those who are anti-war above all else lose everything they have and everything they stand for, the first time someone (anyone!) else decides to threaten them with war. The first time that someone sneak-attacks their Pearl Harbor, or crashes planes into their Twin Towers, or whatever else.

Maybe war is like abortion (in this singularly metaphorical political sense). Nobody ever really wants it to happen, and most people do their best to try to avoid it for themselves and others. Yet sometimes, despite everyone’s best efforts, it ends up being the safest and healthiest way, sometimes the only way, out of an untenable situation not completely of our own making.

I’m not arguing that World War II was a “good” war and that W. Bush’s Iraq was a “bad” war. That may comport with my personal beliefs, but my real point is that everyone has their own personal beliefs. Everyone has something that is most important to them.

If you say that war is never justified for any reason, then you are also saying that your call for pacifism is more important than whatever the reason for the war may be. Not just more important for you, but for everyone else too.

There is a phone app, that pretty much allows you phone to work like the scanner gun. I’ve used it before and it works fine, but my phone’s camera is not as good as the guns at scanning barcodes.

Also, as much as I realize I am trading privacy for control, I figure there’s no need to have the grocery store’s app living on my phone, when it is just as easy for me to use the dedicated device they provide in-store.

In the produce section, they have scales that print out barcoded price stickers. I look up the item I’m weighing (or enter the PLU) and it gives me a sticker I can scan.

In the bakery section, where you can pick out individual muffins or donuts, they have barcodes printed on the self-service case above each item. I can just scan the barcode for whatever I take.

(I do also have the option of checking things out at the end, if I didn’t scan them with the gun.)

==

EDIT to Add:

Ironically, the only time I remember taking something from that store without paying for it was a time that my self-scanned order had been flagged for an audit. I was trying to buy a watermelon on sale, but the sale price didn’t come up when I scanned it, so I set it aside to figure out at checkout.

When I got to checkout, my order was flagged for an audit. (Maybe even precisely because I had scanned the watermelon but then removed it from my cart when it came up at the wrong price.)

The guy running the self-checkout saw the flashing light at my register. Without comment, he came over to perform the ritual of scanning the certain number of items in my cart to reset the transaction and allow me to pay and be on my way. He and I had both been through this procedure many times. He probably performed it several times each shift he worked there.

I was distracted by the audit, however, and I forgot about the watermelon. When he scanned enough items and punched in his code, the register came up with my total and asked me how I was going to pay. I stuck in my credit card, clicked “yes” to the transaction amount, and made my way out of the store with a pilfered watermelon.

The grocery store I shop at has handheld scanner guns for customer use. I check out a gun by scanning my loyalty card, then make my way around the store, scanning each item as I put it in my cart. When I’m done, the handheld scanner displays a barcode that I scan at the self-checkout scanner. My entire order shows up on the screen there, along with the total cost. I pay, take my receipt, and head out to the parking lot.

I like scanner-gun shopping a lot. I like it because it’s efficient, but also because it puts me in control. I can see the real price of everything I take off the shelf, in real-time. If something doesn’t ring up at the price it’s marked, I know instantly. The device keeps a running total as I shop.

Most days, my entire grocery experience involves no direct interaction with any store employee whatsoever, except maybe to exchange pleasantries with a stockperson. I do 100% of the work of checking myself out. I imagine the money the store saves on me in labor might make up for a lot of the money it loses in shrink.

But the store gets something else from my use of its scan-as-you-shop service. It gets to collect a huge amount of data on the way I shop. Not only does it record everything I buy, but it knows when and where I buy it. It knows the patterns of how I move through the store. It can compare my patterns to the patterns of all the other shoppers who use store scanner guns. It can analyze these patterns for useful information about everything from store layout to shoplifting mitigation.

One of the ways the store mitigates shrink from scanner gun shoppers who might accidentally “forget” to scan an item they put in their cart is point-of-sale audits. Not usually, but every so often and on a regular basis, my order will be flagged for an audit when I go to check out. When this happens, the cashier running the self-checkout area has to come over and scan a certain number of items in my cart, to make sure they were all included in my bill.

My main point in all of this was to offer a narrative that runs counter to the narrative I picked up from the article. I prefer to have more control over my checkout experience, and I will willingly choose to surrender personal information about my shopping habits and check-out procedures in order to gain that control, every chance I get.

Trump became a god to that entire swath of willfully ignorant racist Americans, way back when he first attacked sitting President Obama for not being an American citizen.

Trump used the same tactic against Obama that he always uses. The same tactic he perfected in all his ridiculously public feuds with people like Rosie O’Donnell. It’s simple: The more audacious the accusation, the more press coverage it gets. The bigger the lie, the more it gets repeated.

In a certain way, I still think of the entire MAGA movement as payback for America electing a Black man to be President in 2008. And I’m still shocked to think even before 2008, there must have always been that much anger and hate and fear there, among my fellow Americans. But the hate was quieter before Trump, and easier not to see unless you were looking for it.

But that’s why I think Trump is so much more dangerous than DeSantis, or any other wannabe strongman autocrat). Trump’s already tapped into all that pent-up American hate years ago, and Trump’s completely owned it ever since. As demonstrated countless times already, he controls that hate and can use it to make his followers do or say literally anything.

There are many reasons that George H.W. Bush chose to nominate Thomas, but one of them is almost surely that Thomas is black. The seat Thomas was nominated to fill was the one left by Thurgood Marshall, who retired in declining health.

Justice Thurgood Marshall was a consistent liberal vote and a strong proponent of civil rights protections. Before becoming a Justice himself, Marshall argued dozens of civil rights cases before the Supreme Court, including Brown v. Board of Education. Marshall’s “sliding-scale” situation-informed style would seem to be in direct conflict with Thomas’s unyielding “textual originalism.”

I was in my early 20s that summer when the Clarence Thomas confirmation, and Anita Hill’s testimony, were everywhere on the news. I even remember it in an episode of the sitcom Designing Women, albeit in a plausibly deniable “bothsides” kind of way. The story raged because of its high stakes and titillating content, but it also prompted some frank. worthwhile discussion about some uncomfortable topics.

And then Thomas publicly complained that the sexual harassment complaints against him amounted to a “high-tech lynching.” And then, slowly but surely, we all came to understand it was pretty much over.

“He played the race card,” his detractors complained. But his supporters answered, weren’t those detractors playing the race card too? What if the real racist is the person who automatically assumes the word “lynching” was intended to be taken in a race-related context in the first place?

It went back and forth like that for a while, as the public spotlight on the story faded out. But we weren’t talking about Anita Hill’s testimony anymore. We weren’t even talking about Thomas’s suitability as a Supreme Court Justice anymore. It was pretty much all “race card” stuff from there on out.

There are many, many reasons that GHWB nominated Thomas. At least one of them is that Thomas is black, and that it would have been a bad look (politically and otherwise) to nominate someone who was not black to replace Marshall.

Thomas is black. That gives him the right to “play the race card,” as far as I’m concerned. But fair play calls for laying your cards on the table, for everyone to see. Thomas has always cared more about the cards he keeps up his sleeve.

Yes, that sounds right, except that I think it really is relevant that one party was a U.S. citizen.

There are strict laws against the U.S. government surveilling U.S. citizens without a warrant. By using FISA information gathered through warrantless foreign surveillance, the FBI appeared to be taking a backdoor around those laws.

FISA stands for “Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.” By definition, it’s only supposed to be used in the surveillance of people foreign to the U.S.A. The FBI’s job is domestic law enforcement. It’s the FBI’s job to investigate crime involving U.S. citizens.

Officially, the NSA does not spy on U.S. citizens. You can believe whatever you want about whether it actually “unofficially” does, but unless you do a lot of business overseas, chances are high that Google and Amazon and Facebook all have collected way more personal information about you than the NSA has.

Even if the NSA does surveil U.S. citizens, it can’t use any information it obtains in any legal or political way, or in any otherwise public manner.

If a U.S. citizen has communications with a foreigner, however, it is possible that those communications will be surveilled. The NSA does spy on foreign citizens, just like foreign intelligence agencies spy on U.S. citizens. If you’re a U.S. citizen communicating with a foreigner who’s being surveilled, then your communications with that person are going to be surveilled as well.

But again, it’s not the FBI’s job to police international crime – that’s the job of the CIA. As the article describes, this is why it is a bad idea for the FBI to be using FISA intelligence. This is why “it’s a problem when they do it to Americans.”

Good point!

For the sake of accuracy, Hulu is owned by Disney which also owns ABC, as well as ESPN, Marvel, and Fox Entertainment (but not Fox “News”).

Meanwhile, a couple years ago, CBS and Viacom merged to become “Paramount Global” which owns both CBS and the Paramount (streaming) Network (obviously) as well as a slew of cable channels including Showtime, MTV, Nickelodeon, BET, Comedy Central….

And as noted, Comcast owns Universal which owns NBC. Their streaming service is “Peacock,” which has yet to demonstrate that it can compete against Disney’s Hulu (or CBS’s Paramount).

This may soon change, however, as licensing agreements expire and corporations begin to run their own content exclusively on their own networks. Disney-owned content will stream on Hulu, Universal-owned content will stream on Peacock, and Paramount-owned content will stream on Paramount. Same goes for all their respective cable TV channel subsidiaries.

This consolidation in media ownership gives more power to the corporations to compete against one another in the emerging streaming-service market, but it also takes power away from the people who create the content. This is a big reason why the screenwriters and SAG are on strike.

I’ve been trying to do my part by watching reruns of The Nanny in demonstration of my support.

Fuck the fascists? For sure. I fucking hate all those motherfuckers.

Except that, just about the worst thing of all about fascism is the way that it goes out of its way to dehumanize other people, just so as to make it easier to hate them.

So how about, “Fuck fascism” then? I could get behind that. But maybe still try to save some small modicum of love, as well, for all the poor souls who’ve been weak or gullible enough to have fallen for it?

Maybe give them one more chance to come out of their holes, if they’re brave enough? When I can, I always try give them one more chance to do that. In any small way whatsoever.

I don’t mean to purposefully give them “one more chance” to troll, or spew their rhetoric, or stoke hate – even though we all know that’s what they’ll do again, 99 times out of 100.

I don’t mean supporting some reddit echo chamber I am ideologically opposed to just to feed my own ego and provide them all fodder for more echo-chamber bullying and false validation. I mean using a forum for good-faith communication among honest strangers. The way forums have always been intended to be used (but never always have) since the beginning of the internet 30 years ago.

I just mean that, when thinking of another person instead of another person’s ideology, I always want to give them just one more chance to listen to me, and one more chance to talk to me, as a fellow person

One more chance to hear another point of view, one more chance to come to understand and communicate and cooperate from a place of their own standing, as opposed to just snapping back defensively from the place that their fascism has conditioned them to react from.

One more one-in-a-hundred chance that my purposeful efforts to humanize my adversary may somehow lead him to humanize me as well.

Fuck fascism, for sure. But I try not to hate a person for their good intentions. It’s said the road to hell is paved with them, but they’re still usually a whole lot more respectable than bad intentions.