What a bunch of SJW horseshit. Makes me ignore the rest of your posts.

I was recently on a jury for a young black man with a volunteer defender. He was acquitted on the most serious charge - the lawyer was quite good, and just bored of defending DWI cases for a living. That's how the system is supposed to work. It's a pity that it doesn't usually, but that's human systems for you. The fact that he's black never mattered to the case (it might have to the cops choosing him to speak with in the first place, but it was definitely his choices that got him arrested).

If you want to claim that the system is biased against blacks over whites after people are arrested, you'll need some evidence for that. Every system gives at least a little advantage to rich people, of course, that's what rich means after all.

Are you being deliberately obtuse? No one has the right to compel these gentlemen to do anything, or take their land, just as they have no right to set the use of anyone else's land. If, however, this is public land (as seems likely), then the government gets to decide what to do with it.

I don't know what their beef is anyhow - build the damned thing on top of the volcano, and if the freaking volcano god doesn't like it, well, I'm sure He'll think of something.

I ran across a great quote the other day.

Whoever has the bigger military owns the land (or gets to say who owns the land if they don't want it). That's the entirety of "international law". Land ownership is similar.

I'm sure you're right. Which god again? I know I don't believe in 9999 of them, but I sometimes forget what the one is that I don't disbelieve. If these religious whackjobs are elected leaders, and represent the will of the majority, then that's that - doesn't matter why they believe. But if they're some vocal minority trying to use the state as a weapon of their religion, that's clearly not religious freedom, is it?

So what part of "land owners or majority in a democracy" was unclear to you? People are free to believe in whatever invisible sky grandfather makes them happy, and do with their own land according to those beliefs. But trying to block construction on someone else's land, or on public land if you're not the majority, is the opposite of religious freedom - it's using the state as an instrument of religion.

More religious whackjobs blocking progress. If they own the land, or represent the majority in a democracy, so be it; otherwise a does of "separation of church and state" would be welcome here. No one should get a free pass on being a religious whackjob simply because they aren't a Christian whackjob.

Equally? Probably not, but it's damn common for both men and women. Everyone has different tastes in what arouses, of course, but Fifty Shades of Grey is no more targeted towards men than Twilight or a Harlequin romance or Sex in the City was.

This Victorian attitude that centers on the idea that women don't like sex just needs to die. Teenage humans are fans of pornography sites. Different strokes for different folks, of course. When a man and a woman both get drunk enough to lower their standards enough to actually get laid, this is not "rape culture", dammit, because men and women both are interested in sex. It's not "lie back and think of Britain" for fuck's sake.

Only from TFS did I learn where this image came from: having first seen it in an age where 16-bit (and even 8-bit) color palettes were the norm, I just assumed it was chosen for the purple feather, the details of feather and hatband and hair (which emphasize compression artifacts) and the human face, which we're very good at seeing distortions in. It just seemed like a challenging photo to compress in the days when jpg was too heavyweight for most PCs.

Still seems like a perfectly reasonable test image.

There's really nothing to see here. Except that long distance with per-minute charges are still a thing. And AOL is still a thing, I guess? I definitely would not have called that. And old people are easily tricked into buying both those things. I don't think addressing the ease with which old people are tricked is on the agenda. Whether it's aluminum siding or their uncle in Uganda, tricking old people is just way too easy. And phone companies will just let you run up tens of thousands of dollars in arbitrary charges in one month, and let you keep doing it for several months when you don't pay the first one, that's definitely been a thing for a while. I'm actually a bit surprised AT&T waived it. In the stories I've heard in the past, the telcos usually put up a pretty good fight about that sort of thing.

It creates a "Virtual quantum burrito"? As long as there's a burrito in the microwave, thrust is always guaranteed to be generated!

Well the tests keep showing the damn thing works! Maybe it's just magic. Works based on fairies flying out of an engineer's butt, or something. Hopefully it doesn't break the universe :-/

It turns out it was only actually torture about 39% of the time.

Real doctors take an oath to do no harm with the knowledge they've been granted. I guess that's why the CIA went with psychologists.

So, let me get this straight. Right-wing government employees are saying the bill is good, while left-wing government employees say it's bad? So, by my model, the bill must either reduce government spending, or reduce government power over people. Given the current GOP, the former is right out, and it's the latter. How am I doing so far?