I would prefer the government was completely indifferent to religious beliefs. Because any belief can be construed as religious if you’re willing to take the position that religion is stupid and you don’t care about optics.
So yeah, I would prefer beliefs not garner you special privileges
What special privileges are being garnered? The topsy-turvy world of the religious person existing as the exception rather than the rule is quite odd to me. But regardless, in the USA the religious exemption policy is incredibly diverse and welcoming, you are correct on that. You do not even need to communicate with your God in expressible ways to other people. What should be the limit on someone's divine communication and the restrictions upon the government they live under?
I would posit that the special privilege has been given to the non-religious, in that they have been able to openly discriminate against religious people in violation of existing laws.
I would suggest looking into the EEOC regulations mentioned by someone else in this thread and Title VII of the 1964 civil rights act.
Is it your position then that it's either your personal belief or a divine communication from your God that the government should be able to discriminate based on religious beliefs, against existing human rights legislation?
I'd prefer that we not all pretend that 2000-year-old religions somehow magically dictated that vaccines were bad. They obviously didn't. These obviously are not legitimate "religious" beliefs. Religion is transparently being used as a cloak for political beliefs fueled by misinformation.
Taking covid-related "religious" beliefs seriously only undercuts societal respect for actual religious belief.
In regards to how religious beliefs are treated in the USA, it's not restricted to the major religions of the world. Someone's communication to their God does not require a many thousand year lineage, it doesn't even need to be able to be communicated in a comprehensible language to others.
It may be that some people aren't professing sincerely held religious beliefs, but if they say they do then as the law is written then it must be respected by their employer. The employer is able to ask some clarifying questions about the religious belief and they only have to provide what would be considered a reasonable accommodation.
The law can certainly be changed but besides the difficulty of the process the implications of allowing the government to gain additional control over what is an acceptable religion sounds like a great way to lead to additional religious pogroms.
> I'd prefer that we not all pretend that 2000-year-old religions somehow magically dictated that vaccines were bad
You don't understand any of the religious arguments if you think its just because it's a vaccine. It could be because fetal tissue was used in manufacturing these vaccines (they were). There are many other such examples.
This is misleading. Some vaccines do use two fetal cell lines in their development or testing. NOT in their "manufacturing". These cell lines were derived from two elective abortions in the 1960s and 1970s. The same cell lines have been used now for over 50 years for various other medical purposes.
Saying "fetal tissue" and "manufacturing" paints rather a different picture.
Also, to be more specific, when we speak of covid vaccines, we're largely talking about the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. Those specific vaccines did NOT use fetal cell lines in their manufacturing. So now you've gone from being misleading to being flat out wrong.
I understand the pseudo-religious arguments quite well, actually. To that point:
"The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were found to be ethically uncontroversial by the pro-life policy organization the Charlotte Lozier Institute. Further, the Secretariat of Pro-Life Activities, a committee within the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, has stated: "neither Pfizer nor Moderna used an abortion-derived cell line in the development or production of the vaccine. However, such a cell line was used to test the efficacy of both vaccines. Thus, while neither vaccine is completely free from any use of abortion-derived cell lines, in these two cases the use is very remote from the initial evil of the abortion...one may receive any of the clinically recommended vaccines in good conscience with the assurance that reception of such vaccines does not involve immoral cooperation in abortion."
I meant that it's disingenuous to portray small-government proponents like he did by using a strawman of someone upset at a clear government power. It adds nothing to the conversation.
For many decades (certainly at least through the 1990s, I think) there was a popular narrative that made poor postal service synonymous with inept government. Almost every citizen regularly visited a post office, and everybody had at least one poor experience. Standing in line at the post office was the equivalent of standing in bread lines in communist countries. This shared experience made the postal service a key talking point by politicians when selling small government, pro-capitalist policies.
For various reasons this narrative has subsided. It probably wouldn't even occur to younger people to perceive in the post office reflections of a wider debate about government. Indeed, for some the post office is seen as a pragmatic answer to providing banking services to poor communities, only distantly related to or even entirely divorced from the big government vs small government debate. Actually, I think in general the debate on both the right and left has shifted away from bickering over the size of government, per se, and instead emphasizes individual rights and injuries.[1]
It's why you'll hear the echos of demands on the right to completely privatize the USPS, almost entirely from the older generation because newer conservative generations couldn't care less unless you're talking about Jeff Bezos.
[1] IMO I think that conservatives won the small government debate in the 1990s, for better or worse. There was a confluence of events in both America and Europe that effectively resolved the debate. Rather, policy proposals these days either rely on some public-private model, or simply attempt to exact concessions from private industry. The government directly doing something themselves is completely off the table. See, e.g., rayiner's comparison of Stockholm's and LA's fiber initiatives.
Red/Green colorblind doesn't mean we don't see red and green, it's just not as powerful. It should read Red/Green deficient. Maybe that is why it doesn't seem so bad because to a Red/Green colorblind person the colors are more subdued.
I do realize this. I also know someone that has had problems with it on github's diffs. I do think it would be better to use other colors to avoid the issue entirely.
I don't think this should be in the application. It's a monitor or OS issue. Couldn't we just use a color calibration matrix to map all colors to the spectrum the colorblind person does see?
So you propose that colorblind people should make their OS turn all images, photographs and video into false color not correlating with reality because in some specific contexts color is used symbolically and it's important to distinguish between two colors? One option that might work would be a special drawing mode implemented in the OS graphics stack that did some mapping depending on what's configured in the accessibility settings; then applications could request that in the rare cases where it's important.
As a partially colorblind person (albeit easily capable of telling red from green here), while of course such a mode should not be required for programming, I wouldn't mind using it in general. The EnChroma glasses try to do this in real life, but they're expensive and only work in bright sunlight; if I can at least get the same for photos just by downloading something, it sounds interesting. (And probably already exists, so I should do some Googling.)
That's a really interesting idea. You'd want a fast toggle for it, so that you could use it primarily for browsing semantic content that uses colors, but not always for photographs or videos that represent the real world (unless those photos or videos contained such semantic content). It's not ideal, but much like assistive devices that translate vision to other nerve impulses (http://www.nei.nih.gov/news/briefs/weihenmayer.asp), it could be useful as a learned adaptation.
That said, it would also make sense for diff software in particular (as one of the most prominent software uses of red and green right next to each other for semantic purposes) to have an easily adjusted option for a different color scheme for the very common case of red/green colorblindness.
That's not the same. When you go from 3D to 2D you lose a dimension. Information is lost. When you map color spaces like I proposed you go from 1D to 1D, you're just compressing the data in that dimension. No information is lost (except because of the limits of numerical accuracy)
A friend of mine set one off when we were traveling in Australia. We talked with the guard (who very 100% ralaxed) and he said that setting off the detector is incredibly easy. While he was searching my friend's purse, we were told that some of the chemicals used in make up can set it off. After finding nothing, we were free to continue. Took all of 3 minutes, no additional security, no prolonged questioning, just a simple check and go.
I'm not who you originally asked, but I share his sentiment that javascript is a nice language. I've used python for years, have a few open source applications with Java, and written several scripts for my own purposes in C. I've also explored C++, haskell, scheme, ruby, and MIPS assembly. Not a whole lot of PHP. So I use javascript for everything? Not even close. But I still like it.
