What’s more reliable than NPR?

YoU dOn’T kNoW wHaT lIBeRaL mEaNs

To be fair, there is a considerable amount of overlap.

Nuance has entered the discussion

It’s ironic that you cite a country where the government and ruling family are linked inextricably to Islam, but I digress.

I wish that were true. But we’ve got a history of being extremely callous with athletes and spectators alike.

Name any other ongoing event that kills thousands of people every single year like clockwork.

Not trying to argue or anything… I just think that Islam is a foolish religion in the same way that Muslims might think that Mormonism is a foolish religion.

Mormonism is stupid, but if they had an event that killed thousands of people from Utah every year I would like to think that at least OSHA would step in or something.

If they’d died in the Saudi heat to a secular activity - at an F1 race event or inside a poorly A/C’d movie theater or trapped on an overheated bus - would that have been better?

What a ridiculous statement. No it wouldn’t be better, but when was the last time you heard of nearly a thousand people dying at an F1 race event, or inside a movie theatre due to lack of AC? If that were happening multiple times per year we would shut down F1 /movie theaters in a heartbeat.

Fact is that the Hajj claims thousands of lives every year, all in the name of religion.

Which is a shame, because the Hajj as a cultural event was originally intended as this class-agnostic unifying practice social event. You aren’t supposed to visit these holy sites encapsulated into these exclusive expensive little bubbles. You’re intended to mingle with people from the rest of the world and revel in a certain shared experience common to the faith the world over.

Yea as long as you aren’t a woman.

Don’t be surprised that people are using religion to grift the gullible and exploit the poor - that’s what religion is best at.

The Saudi government has an ethical responsibility to mitigate the risks. It’s not like this was some freak accident. This was entirely predictable and this will defiantly continue to happen until protections are put into place.

Such senseless loss of life in the name of religion. Many hundreds or thousands of people die each year doing the pilgrimage, often times from crowd crushes, literally getting squished to death because there are so many people, or just exhaustion.

There are only a few short video clips on YouTube of the massive crowds and it is sort of unnerving seeing that many people in a moving crowd. Super weird what religion makes people do.

There is also this weird video which talks about how they plan to revolutionize the hajj to make it safer and accessible to more people - using technology in a weird blend of old world meets new.

I do hope they find a way to make it safer because people will never stop doing it, but the whole concept just seems absurd to me.

Is that what it takes to get two different desktop orientations using Linux?

I couldn’t resist

You could use Windows 11 from Microsoft, it can do both landscape and portrait.

Is that how that one person cheated and Magnus refused to play or something like that?

So yea, I hear you. I pretty much exclusively listen to NPR for news, and they are pretty balanced if not potentially a little left leaning from time to time, which I actually find refreshing.

But when a measurable percentage of the country thinks fox is fair and balanced, or that FB is a news source, the ability for our free press to safeguard democracy is severely threatened.

What good is free press when there are no longer facts and everything is opinion based?

Paraphrasing Asimov, ‘There is a cult of ignorance which operates under the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is as good as your knowledge.’

When trump took a play straight out of the dictators handbook and started shouting fake news, I began to fear that this was the beginning of the end. The real beginning however was probably a few decades back when news went from dry and factual to sensationalist infotainment.

I have always felt that freedom of press was one of the most fundamental aspects of a working democracy. Without a free press, you cannot have proper checks and balances. Unfortunately, while press is still ‘free’, actual unbiased news gets only a small fraction of the viewership. Mainstream ‘news’ is nearly completely opinion driven, and profit is the incentive rather than the dissemination of information. The free press no longer serves its necessary function, there is no accountability, and democracy is at risk.

Mostly it’s the Christians that support Israel… they want to bring about the end times and they think that the Jews destroying the Muslims is the only way to make it happen. I really wish I was making this up. They are indeed that stupid.

For the both of them

I actually had a pet moose named Sarah, but have never had a pet ant named Sarah so I can’t confirm this.

Thank you, I should have just kept pushing it further and further into absurdity.

The joke is that the meme has bad grammar, deer is plural. Rather than point out the obvious, I say that ant is plural, which is funny because it is both stupid, and draws attention to the deer/s. When my comment wooshes over heads, I follow it up with an even stupider comment, thinking that nobody could possibly be stupid enough to think that there is someone out there that thinks ant is a plural american english version of the British ‘ants’… and then I am once again astonished.

Well maybe I was referring to deer, and not ants. Humor is dead.

Maybe in the original British English it’s not, but in American English, ant is plural