Ear buds or IEMs typically have a much higher sensitivity than full sized headphones. The higher the output power of your PC’s headphone out, the louder your earbuds will be at any given volume %.

There isn’t anyway around this except to manually change the volume whenever you use your earbuds.

Same here, although I confess I wasn’t blown away by this one. I often find that while Ghibli films always crush it on the imagination front, the writing can be hit and miss. I understood the autobiographical origin of the plot, but there were several parts that felt underdeveloped or poorly explained. Overall, was good but definitely not up there with Mononoke or Spirited Away, imo

Just don’t take it too seriously, I would say. Not every news piece from the same source is going to be of the same quality or bias.

With each passing week, there are more and more parallels to the aftermath of 9-11. Israel has now even had its own equivalent to the leaked photos of prisoners (held without trial) being degraded, tortured, and sexually assaulted at Abu Grahib.

It’s depressing watching history repeat itself within your own lifetime, even despite the far greater visibility of Israel’s war crimes thanks to the internet.

When I was on in Reddit I used to do it all the time, but writing everything out, organizing it and including citations etc. can be rather time-intensive.

These days, I’ll leave a quick comment on a post if I have enough time, but nothing major.

I used to be a fan of it, but in the past couple of years I’ve seen MBFC rate sources as “highly credible” that are anything but, particularly on issues involving geopolitics. That, plus the inherent unreliability of attempting to fix an entire news outlet to a single point on a simple Left <-> Right spectrum, has rendered it pretty useless, in my opinion.

There days I’m much more of the opinion that it’s best to read a variety of sources, both mainstream and independent, and consider factors like

1. is this information well-sourced?
2. is there any obvious missing context?
3. is this information up to date?
4. what are the likely ideological biases of this writer or publication?
5. What is the quality of the evidence provided to support the claims made in the article?

And so on. It’s much better this way than outsourcing your critical thinking to a third party who may be using a flawed methodology.

30 is way too many. Ideally, you want about 4-5 parties in order to maintain a healthy democracy without getting bogged down.

Either way, the two party corporate duopoly of the US ain’t it.

Sure there’s a lot of garbage out there, but YouTube and platforms like Substack allow former corporate journalists who want more freedom to do proper investigative stuff. You just have to be discerning with your sources.

I like Zeteo (Mehdi Hassan, formerly MSNBC), Drop Site News (Jeremy Scahill, formerly TheIntercept) and The Real News Network (Chris Hedges, formerly NYT) the best. Breaking Points also put out some good commentary occasionally.

There is no rule that says the universe must make sense to human beings. In fact the more we learn about it - subatomic particles, quantum mechanics, the multiverse, etc. the stranger it becomes and the less it appears to operate in ways that are intuitive to our primitive primate brains.

Hell, even space and time might not be fundamental properties, and could themselves be abstractions which emerge from an even deeper underlying reality…

All of which is to say your list should have an extra option:

D. Who The Fuck Knows?

As someone married to a JW and who is friends with several others, I will say this: like any group of people, they can be a mixed bag. Some are more closeted and “in the truth” whereas others are more outgoing and “worldly”.

One the things that I actually admire about them (the individuals, mind you, not the Watchtower organization) is that they really seem to try and live by the teachings of the Bible and study it frequently. Much more so than, say, your average evangelical Protestant.

As someone who is mostly agnostic, those who belive that absence of evidence equals evidence of absence belong in psychotherapy.

This position is a straw man. Atheists generally do not argue that God categorically does not exist. Instead, we usually say that we don’t believe in God because there is insufficient evidence. Much like the proverbial invisible unicorn in your backyard - since there is no evidence that it exists, there is no reason for it to affect how we go about our daily lives.

When it comes to whether you’re agnostic or atheist, I think it helps to answer the following question on a scale of 0 - 10: How confident are you that God exists? If you say around 5, then you’re agnostic. If you say around 1 or 2, then you’re an atheist.

Because

• None of the above legally prevent him from running.
• Republican voters will still vote for him en masse.

It’s that simple.

It’s not that simple; A court must rule that the action in question is an “official act”. As the SCOTUS intentionally declined to elaborate further on how this is defined, it will be up for the courts to decide what is and what is not covered by immunity.

Not that this couldn’t become subject to abuse and partisan rulings, but it’s more than just the presidental equivalent of

I’d say a good-sized part of it is simply the American preference for watching beautiful, weathly people doing beautiful, wealthy people things. Hollywood rom-coms and US TV shows in general clearly skew towards upper middle class settings when compared to the equivalents from, say, the UK.

In other words, I reckon US media prefer their fictional characters to be aspirational whereas other cultures prefer theirs to be relatable.

The Death of Stalin is great.

Yeah, same. Getting past Guardians in BoTW required relying heavily on save scumming until I managed to get it right. Any fight that needed flurry rush was also always a disaster.

Not really, and I think that’s because in many games I play primarily to experience the world, find new items, and generally explore. The story itself usually takes a back seat and is rarely the thing driving me forward.

One counterpoint to that, off the top of my head, is Journey, which I always play through to the end scene.

Darks Souls 3, Breath of the Wild, Tears of the Kingdom, Skyrim.

I love RPGs but hate boss fights, for some reason. Once I feel I’ve done enough exploration and character development, I invariably lose all interest close to the last boss.

It’s not so much saying that someone’s religious beliefs are logically impossible, more highly unlikely. When I typically see this rhetoric, it’s generally along the lines of “how on Earth did you weigh up all the evidence (or lack thereof) and come to the conclusion that God exists?”, or more impolite words to that effect.

I personally don’t browbeat the religious, so I’m not condoning it, but that’s why this line of argument generally isn’t gnostic atheism.

If, on the other hand, someone is actually saying that the existence of God is logically impossible, a priori, then that would be gnostic atheism. But, like I said before, that generally isn’t what most atheists believe or argue for.