I don’t think the name argument holds water. Just look at the Department of Justice lately. It just happens to be true in this case.

This is absolutely a case where people should be disobeying immoral (and illegal) orders

Wouldn’t it be more sensible to invest in some surge protection, if that’s an issue where you are?

Even if it affected his supporters more than others, it would still be a bad thing. If change is to happen democratically, it needs to be actually democratic (or as democratic as FPTP gets, anyway).

Putting aside the fact that the IGRC as an organised military doesn’t need to resort to insurgent tactics in a country they control:

If that was the case and liberating the populace from the IRGC was the objective, then the correct solution would be operations on the ground. Provide humanitarian aid to the civilians and make a clear effort to keep them out of the line of fire to win their support, and they’re much more likely to rat out the guy in the basement and help you stage a hostage rescue operation. Familiar faces and voices help get the children out of harm’s way and leave the fighter exposed.

If he starts killing hostages, that will help your cause of painting the enemy as the bad guy and also still be less destructive than bombing the children yourself and galvanising the survivors into resistance. Besides, if he’s in the basement, bombing the above-ground building likely won’t even kill him. You’ll get all the downsides of the approach and not even achieve your objective.

There are now decades of experience to look back on and understand that this approach doesn’t work if you want to dismantle a regime or quell insurgency. No, this is quite blatantly not about military objectives.

The cruelty is the point.

To preface this: I’m also an apostate that used to be quite fervent and zealous. I agree with most of your points.

the teachings of christ as laid out in the gospel

The difficulty I see is that you’re cherry-picking which parts of the gospel to apply.

He also taught people to pray for god’s mercy and forgiveness, “thy kingdom come, thy will be done”, and according to him, the highest of commandments is to love God with all your heart and soul. It’s hard to put this in a secular light that doesn’t boil down to obeying a single highest authority. Yes, loving your neighbour is second, but it’s only second.

If we remove the religious parts, picking out merely his secular points, maybe reframe references to heaven as symbolic for “good people”, I agree with you. I’d even add the passage in Revelation about “When I was sick, you cared for me; when I was in prison, you visited me” and so on. It is an unmistakable message saying “Unconditional solidarity is divine.”

“What you did to the lowest of my brothers” is a very clear bar to set: Deporting immigrants is a sin against God so grave that piety alone can’t wash it clean. I’d read as a parallel to “If you want to know the worth of a society, see how it treats its poor.”

My contention is just that I don’t think it’s possible to cleanly separate his character from his religious nature, nor from what that religion has become. Early Christianity may have had much in common with leftists, but saying “some of his convictions were clearly socialist in nature” isn’t the same as saying “he is a socialist”.

Also, there are probably many leftists that don’t deeply engage with the topic. At a surface level, you see what religion does today, and whatever it may have been or whatever subtext it may have:

the hypocrites have won the battle for messaging and are the ones controlling the narrative.

And that narrative is awful. That alone will be enough to make the sentiment unpopular. Again, I agree with you in many points, and the rest are probably more academic in nature than relevant to the values we want to uphold. But being right (whether partially, mostly or entirely) alone doesn’t always mean you’ll be popular. The figure comes with a baggage that I don’t think can easily be removed.

Hence: To socialists, the fact that Jesus also held some socialist views doesn’t have much weight, because the figure itself has no more value than the views we already hold. It’s the Christians, to whom the figure does have weight, that could use some convincing about those values.

CEOs are lauded as visionary and it’s just not as engaging to read about crushed visions. Even if we disregard the whole “corporate talking pieces” and “journalists often stem from the social elite” parts, just the drive for engagement and clicks would explain a slant towards writing about great ideas rather than disappointing realism. How many people enjoy SciFi? How many love pedantic analyses why they’re absolutely unrealistic?

I mean, I love pedantry (as well as the genre itself), but I’m a minority and fine with it – stories can be fun without being realistic and disbelief can be suspended in favour of entertainment.

CEOs spouting bullshit shouldn’t be taken as stories for entertainment though, and much less printed in a serious manner. For them, critical disassembly should be the norm, mandatory even.

I’ll guess it has something to do with leftists not liking religion. Probably because the whole idea of a supreme ruler demanding obedience and tribute in exchange for nebulous promises instead of using his power to improve our conditions in the here and now (for the almighty, fixing disease and poverty would definitionally be possible) just doesn’t quite gel with the lip service to solidarity.

Jesus may have been socialist in his speeches, but Christianity as a religion sure isn’t. To wrap it in a biblical metaphor, you’re sowing that word where the soil is infertile and it cannot take root. If you wanna preach, turn Christians into socialists, but don’t expect socialists to be fans of Christianity.

Yeah, but it doesn’t really make a lot of sense. The way it gives the big guy a chatacter 180 when a huge part of his presentation has been his perpetuity… idk, not buying it.

The protag does have some fire lines though.

I’d scale my outrage with the severity of the problem. That’s not to say that it’s a good move, and the law itself must be overturned for everyone’s sake, but regarding systemd, we’re at a weird forking point between “slippery slope fallacy” and the type of gradual accumulation of minor evils that sum up to a great one.

If the slope actually starts slipping and entry becomes mandatory, I’ll take the L and join the push for alternative init systems. Right now, I just have to ration my energy.

This looks like an AI summary of the wordnik collection of definitions put forth by a bunch of different sources:
https://wordnik.com/words/defenestration

At the time of writing, these definitions do seem to be in there.

I’ll believe that if and when they actually force me to upload identification to prove that my birthday really is 1970-01-01 and my name really is Nunya Bissnis. Otherwise, it’s really no different from Steam asking my birthday when opening store pages or porn sites asking “click here jf you’re 18” and take my word for it.

So long as it’s being enforced just as well as the realName field, I maintain that it is indeed harmless. If the point is to have a hilariously ineffective solution as a fig leaf against a stupid law, I’ll prefer that to efforts to actually implement verification.

Yes, Dems bad. Reps worse. Unlike the US political establishment, morality is not a binary.

Even if we assumed Windows was worth using, I’m not sure I would need to explicitly recommend “use the thing that’s everywhere already”. If we’re talking about Linux distros, we’ve already moved on from the standard and into the realm of other options, but the norm generally needs no advertising.