Signal is moderation.
Generating signal is moderating noise. The first moderator of any message is the person converting ideas into language. Understanding the interplay of how messages get moderated by the various layers they pass through is what media literacy is.
Now tell us how many Heritage Foundations recommendations do the Republicans and Trump take on board! Distancing the Heritage Foundations from them rather undersells the position of one of the most influential public policy organizations particularly within conservative politics.
Ah, yes, the perennial take of "only those I deem socially acceptable should be allowed at pride". Happy Pride Month, everybody! Remember to leave all the parts of you that make people uncomfortable in the closet!
The Heritage Foundation is wild, and one of the most significant public policy groups with deep ties to American conservatism. Basically, any crazy policy that the Republican party has taken on as a major party plank in the past 50 years has a distressing high chance of having its roots in Heritage's recommendations.
For example, in 1981:
Among the 2,000 Heritage policy recommendations, approximately 60% of them were implemented or initiated by the end of Reagan's first year in office.
Sounds like a reason for Biden to set a whole bunch of legal precedent while he's still president.
Yeah, given how much Trump and Republicans lean on Heritage, and Trump has been talking about doing some "light" tyranny on day 1, it's ridiculous to attempt to write off the Heritage Foundations' plan to Christian Fascism.
You mean the ones they bombed the following day? They followed evacuation orders. An Israeli airstrike killed them the next day.
First-Past-the-Post voting makes this shit suck so hard. Not only does voting third party reduce the threshold for the rest of the field and in particular the party I definitely don't want in power, that party is most incentivised to prop up my third party candidate. They get to count my vote as win, and with the stakes as high as they are even losing an election cycle means people I care about get seriously hurt.
The prices for fixed costs have gone up, too. People need a place to live, the health to keep living, and ways of ensuring access to both, and the costs of all of those have gone up as well. A not insignificant chuck of people don't have discretionary spending to cut (not to mention how stressful living paycheck-to-paycheck on the bare essentials can be). Yes, it is certainly worth reevaluating budgets and determining where expenses can be lowered, but those margins have been getting thinner for a long while.
Vote in primaries, vote in off-year elections, vote in local races. We can't hinge our entire political strategy on who wins the biggest race every four years while ignoring the rest of the political system if we want any chance of having options besides what the two large parties present us.
Palestine's border crossings are controlled by Israel. Early on, Israel stopped allowing border crossing. To the point that a major international concern was the inability for any aid trucks to enter. Additionally, movement within the West Bank has been heavily restricted by Israel's checkpoints. And Israel has for a very long time actively denied Palestinian refugees the right to return to their homes if they do leave. If it is difficult to understand why this sort of forced movement and controlled borders is an issue, I encourage you to read up on the Trail of Tears and South African Apartheid.
Movement and Access in the West Bank | August 2023 West Bank movement restrictions make life harder for residents and aid organisations
And Egypt's borders were not completely open. In part, because they did were not aiding Israel doing a forced displacement of Palestinian citizens. As a reminder, the forcible removal of a people, in whole or in part, is one of the kinds of genocide. Perhaps you might want to consider why you're advocating for the forced displacement of an entire people. Why Egypt has not fully opened its Gaza border for fleeing Palestinians
Then you must be quite frustrated that Israel disagrees.
Israel seized control of the Rafah border crossing. The impact could be devastating
If you vote with the hope that it will fixes problem by itself, you won't get very far. Voting is sort of the end of a political process, the other end starting in people building political movements. For your vote to mean something, you have to be voting with a political project. So, focus on the political projects: start building the structures that protect people first, without relying on the government's approval. Support your communities of care and build your mutual aid networks. Don't wait for it to be delivered from on high, get with people who also care about the things you care about and start using what you have to build what you can.
Sorry, but it's actually pretty hard to dismiss the Romans passage, but it is something that can be chalked up to Paul being sex negative, going so far as to exhort people to be chaste or get married if they can't control their passion if, as he noted, they were not free from such passion as he claimed to be. The other passages commonly cited don't reference homosexuality nearly as directly, but it would not be a difficult argument to make that the word choices were specifically defaming homosexuality (especially given how common it is for people to use the same sort of defamation). Which isn't to say that every denomination adheres to the same interpretation of these passages, but they aren't on as theologically shaky ground as we might hope.
Expecting Christians to follow a given text to the letter will always be setting yourself up for failure. Not only do people pick and choose the doctrine they follow (or more often have it picked and chosen for them by their spiritual leader), different traditions have different emphasis and even different texts they're operating off of. Expecting an legalistic following of a specific interpretation will leave you expecting far different behavior that most of your observations will show.
Perhaps they should have left Western style Manifest Destiny in the past.
I'm not sure how "tens of billions of dollars of military aid" counts as not intervening in a foreign conflict.
It is a bit galling to be told endlessly that we must shut up and choose when the choice is "genocide or more genocide", even when the reason Harris is on the top of the ballot at all is as a result of speaking up about the issues with Biden. I'm not all that comfortable merely accepting that, to escape the chopping block myself, I must remain silent about my family members. I'm sorry that Harris is so tied to Israel's expansionist agenda that my inability to stomach rampant slaughter is threatening her and the Democratic party's chances against Trump and the Republican party, but I can't let some tens of thousands of killing go.
Not my point. You absolutely can point to homophobic passages of the Bible. You can also point to passages of the Bible that are not talking about homosexuality in specific, but that are commonly interpreted as such. My point is that expecting even Christians to agree with other Christians about what texta constitute the Bible let alone what those specific texts actually say is an exercise in futility.
This is the why of the existence of all the various sects and denominations of Christianity. There are theologians who have done lots of academic work to show how the Bible does not need to be homophobic. There are others who have worked just as hard to justify doing grievous harm to homosexuals. Trying to explain both of those with the One True Reading of the Bible is committing the same error they do.
For my queer ass, if Christians all spontaneously decided to follow the theology of Rev. Fred Rodgers tomorrow, I'm gonna breathe a sigh of relief and leave them alone to be just the nicest people and hope they stay that way.
Somehow, I get the impression that you aren't about to argue that what has happened to the Palestinians is sad and that they should be fighting against the people who did it to them.
I miss when signal-to-noise ratio was common parlance of the Internet.
Making usable spaces is tough work, but having worthwhile content drowned in an ocean of noise is seemingly the default of corporate controlled media anymore, so much have they abandoned paying attention to what they publish. That you don't know who is editorializing and moderating the places you frequent and have opinions on the job they're doing says to me that you're not doing the work that being media literate requires, which is all the more important when so much of it is generated content with no consideration given to reality.