30 is way too many. Ideally, you want about 4-5 parties in order to maintain a healthy democracy without getting bogged down.

Either way, the two party duopoly of the US ain’t it.

Yup, sorry you’re right - it was World News, not News.

I’m not necessarily fully agreeing with OP’s thesis that MBFC is a pro-Zionist project, but I definitely call into question UNWatch’s credibility rating.

I myself debunked a highly flawed and biased article from UNWatch that was posted to News@Lemmy.world last month. The post was removed by the moderator (@FlyingSquid@lemmy.world) after being determined as disinformation. (I can’t link to it, since it has been deleted, but of you want to see the details of my critique, check out this screenshot of my comment)

Having seen that first hand, I would absolutely say that MBFC’s credibility rating system is, at the very least, questionable.

Oh, don’t get me wrong - Budweiser/Coors/Michelob etc. are all awful. However, most US states have good local breweries and craft beers. Lagers are generally not as popular as IPAs, but you can still get good ones. Admittedly, this varies quite a bit depending on where you are in the US.

1. No it’s not.
2. I already use salted butter for toast – American is still worse.
3. Yes it is.

As a cooking ingredient, maybe, but if you’re using butter on toast, bread, etc. then Irish/French/British butter is clearly better.

Also, the superiority of European chocolate isn’t to do with the cocoa content or the sweetness - it’s just creamier and has a smoother texture.

I’ll agree with you on the beer, though.

There is no rule that says the universe must make sense to human beings. In fact the more we learn about it - subatomic particles, quantum mechanics, the multiverse, etc. the stranger it becomes and the less it appears to operate in ways that are intuitive to our primitive primate brains.

Hell, even space and time might not be fundamental properties, and could themselves be abstractions which emerge from an even deeper underlying reality…

All of which is to say your list should have an extra option:

D. Who The Fuck Knows?

As someone married to a JW and who is friends with several others, I will say this: like any group of people, they can be a mixed bag. Some are more closeted and “in the truth” whereas others are more outgoing and " worldly".

One the things that I actually admire about them (the individuals, mind you, not the Watchtower organization) is that they really seem to try and live by the teachings of the Bible and study it frequently. Much more so than, say, your average evangelical Protestant.

As someone who is mostly agnostic, those who belive that absence of evidence equals evidence of absence belong in psychotherapy.

This position is a straw man. Atheists generally do not believe that God categorically does not exist. Instead, we usually say that we don’t believe in God because there is insufficient evidence. Much like the proverbial invisible unicorn in your backyard - since there is no reason to suggest that it exists, there is no reason for it to affect how we go about our daily existence.

When it comes to whether you’re agnostic or atheist, I think it helps to answer the following question on a scale of 0 - 10: How confident are you that God exists? If you say around 4 or 5, then you’re agnostic. If you say between 0 and 2, then you’re an atheist.

I’d say a good-sized part of it is simply the American preference for watching beautiful, weathly people doing beautiful, wealthy people things. Hollywood rom-coms and US TV shows in general clearly skew towards upper middle class settings when compared to the equivalents from, say, the UK.

In other words, I reckon US media prefer their fictional characters to be aspirational whereas other cultures prefer theirs to be relatable.

More frequent kernel updates.

• requires a fair bit of post-installation configuration (suboptimal OOTB experience for newbies)
• Uses btrfs by default but comes with no snapshots or GUI manager pre-configured for system restore
• Less software availability compared to Ubuntu or Mint
• More likely to break than Ubuntu or Mint

The Death of Stalin is great.

But isn’t this something you can tweak within your DE configuration? I’m on Gnome and don’t have this issue.

This sounds like a DE thing than a Wayland/X thing.

It’s not so much saying that someone’s religious beliefs are logically impossible, more highly unlikely. When I typically see this rhetoric, it’s generally along the lines of “how on Earth did you weigh up all the evidence (or lack thereof) and come to the conclusion that God exists”, or more impolite words to that effect.

I personally don’t browbeat the religious, so I’m not condoning it, but that’s why this line of argument generally isn’t gnostic atheism.

If, on the other hand, someone is actually saying that the existence of God is impossible, a priori, then they just haven’t thought things through.

Gnostic atheists are only a thing on paper; I’ve never met or heard of another atheist who ascribes to this view. As the link you provided states, this academic definition of atheism is not one ascribed to by the vast majority of self-described atheists.

Or, to quote the American Atheists organization:

Atheism is not an affirmative belief that there is no god nor does it answer any other question about what a person believes. It is simply a rejection of the assertion that there are gods. Atheism is too often defined incorrectly as a belief system. To be clear: Atheism is not a disbelief in gods or a denial of gods; it is a lack of belief in gods. Source

On this basis, any invisible unicorn/intergalactic teapot/flying spaghetti monster argument that invokes “burden of proof” is not an gnostic atheist position. The argument is based on the idea that until evidence for an invisible unicorn exists, there is no reason for it to have any bearing on our behavior.

This is different from saying that because no evidence of an invisible unicorn exists, that we must conclude that it categorically does not exist. You cannot logically prove the non-existence of a non-existent entity.

As an atheist who is not anti-religion, I wholeheartedly agree. The religious do not have a monopoly on irrationality, or weaponizing ideology.

I see many atheists on forums proposing the idea that if we could only just get rid of religion, the world would be a harmonious and rational place. As if human beings wouldn’t still be perfectly able to come up with new and interesting ways to justify conflict and division amongst themselves.

I agree with your second paragraph but take issue with your first.

Atheism is not the belief that God categorically does not exist; it’s the position that there is insufficient evidence to conclude that God exists, and that therefore there is no reason to believe in him/her/it. It’s a subtle but important distinction because the first is not logically consistent whereas the latter is.

Agnosticism, on the other hand, tends to either be the view that the likelihood of God existing is more or less equal to that of God not existing, or the view that we will probably never know so we cannot come down on one side or the other.

True. There’s something to be said for pleasuring any passing bats who might be in the vicinity.