Loving regardless of physical appearance doesn’t follow from loving for more than just physical appearance.

(I suspect that “don’t be shallow” is the sort of advice that people often feel good giving but don’t sincerely believe, but even the most sincerely non-shallow person generally can’t simply ignore sexual orientation. Once you allow for sexual orientation, then you’re already at the point where certain details of a person’s physical appearance are absolutely critical for romantic love.)

Do you guys feel like you’re the same people you were when you were kids? I feel like there’s a direct connection between me now and me as a teenager (over 20 years ago) but a break between me now and me as a pre-teen who wanted to go out and do things instead of sitting at a computer all day.

I wouldn’t be able to do that - I had to stop drinking caffeine a few years ago but still get cranky if I don’t have the experience of drinking a big mug of tea in the morning, despite the fact that the decaf tea has no direct pharmacological effect on me. Then whenever I’m bored or anxious or tired I make another big mug of decaf tea and feel better. It has to be tea; other beverages don’t help. Purely psychosomatic but still definitely a real effect.

You know those jokes about how people already in hell don’t know that they’re in hell? Relevant.

Obviously the average American isn’t directly participating in making the major decisions, but what the average American wants still generally has far more influence on the future of the entire world than what the average citizen of any other country wants.

Well, I have the option of leaving. It’s not purely hypothetical for me because I’m not originally from the USA - I was just a kid when I came here, so it wasn’t my choice but it was a choice and I can see myself making a similar choice to go somewhere else. Maybe I will need to leave if things in the USA get a lot worse but for now living in a blue state still seems like the best available option.

Eh, at least the USA has agency - we get to choose which stupid direction to take half the world in, while most other countries are just along for the ride. Nowhere else except maybe China is like that, and I prefer even Trump to Xi.

What I don’t get are the dogs that like people but are are aggressive towards other dogs. They’re not always angry, but they do just hate all other members of their own species?

The incident mentioned in the article ended with the passport returned, but if there are other incidents of passports being taken and not returned then I would agree with you.

Actually, according to the article the main difficulty is just the lack of a passport. The article does mention that some legal residents of the USA might be worried that they would nonetheless be prevented from returning if they left the country to act as chaperones for these children, but that’s a purely hypothetical problem so far.

Are you aware that there is a significant population of white people in South Africa and a long history of racial conflict there between them and the black majority? The white minority ruled over and oppressed the black majority until the end of apartheid in the early nineties and the idea that the majority could now be persecuting the minority is not ridiculous per se the way that you imply it is, although the general consensus outside of the circles Trump listens to is that such persecution isn’t happening.

Ah yes, an “unauthorized modification”. It must have been the janitor pressing buttons accidentally while mopping the mainframe room.

That works out to an annual salary of about $62,500 for a full-time employee and my intuition is that the marginal value of the lowest-paid hotel employees to their employers is a lot less than that, but the nice thing about this being a local law is that LA can experiment on itself and the rest of the country can watch and learn. If this works well, other cities can do the same thing and if this doesn’t then the harm is relatively limited.

(I noticed that the law only applies to hotels with over sixty rooms. I already stay exclusively in Airbnbs when I travel because that’s cheaper. Is LA also one of those cities making it difficult to run an Airbnb or is this going to make large hotels even less competitive in that regard?)

Your interpretation of “subject to to the jurisdiction of the United States” is the one that would make this clause meaningless in the context of the amendment. A sovereign government has that sort of authority over everyone in the country, so presumably the amendment is talking about something different or otherwise there would have been no point in explicitly including the clause at all.

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

I admit that I’m not sure how to interpret this in a way that includes freed slaves, people born in the Confederacy during the Civil War, but not everyone else born on US territory, but the implication of having two separate clauses is still that a person may be born in the United States but not subject to the jurisdiction thereof. I think that the Trump administration’s arguments seem like a stretch, but so is asserting that the “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” clause means nothing.

So is referring to a woman as “Barbie” not sexist if she works for Trump, or is it still sexist but it’s ok to be sexist towards women who work for Trump?

(I’d ban Daily Beast links if I were in charge.)

Lifting sanctions on Syria is not wrong just because Trump does it. Biden/Harris would probably have done it too, and rightly so because this guy as the ruler of Syria is the best the US can get.

Their true purpose is sinister.

No portrait-orientation video is worth watching.

Edit about the article of clothing: men’s legs and feet look weird and so I don’t like going out in public without long pants and shoes.

“Compelled by law” isn’t a sufficient justification for Catholics in this case - they’re supposed to die rather than reveal something that was said to them in confession, like Saint John of Nepomuk.