Trump to sign yet another trash executive order, this time on 'the cyber'

Maybe it isn’t something to worry about?

it’d still be way better if the whitehouse website reflected that the bills of rights applies to people, not just citizens. it just doesn’t seem like this reflects an attempt to reframe things by trump.

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They must have decided that it needed to be eviled up…

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woah. us culture? do you mean muslims, jews, and atheists don’t contribute equally to the culture of the united states?

moreover, the country was deliberately not founded on the christian religion, despite many of the founders being christian.

it could have been, other countries had been, but the founders were smart enough to give it a wholly secular foundation.

case in point, the basic concept of democracy itself isn’t in the bible nor from the bible. freedom of the press? the right to assemble? where are those?

the basic framework of us law comes mainly from english and french commonlaw, and without a doubt christianity influenced that commonlaw, but it was not built upon it.

i know you must know these things. please don’t pass around evangelical talking points.

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THIS WILL TAKE CARE OF THINGS LIKE TRAINING EMPLOYEES IN PASSWORD SECURITY, RIGHT?

(JFC, Sean. Twice in a 24 hour period.)

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They don’t want to have to explain the difference between normal people and those people being tortured in Gitmo and other places.

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Look… I was just trying to make a point about how you can’t lump everything in the banned countries under the single label of Muslim. At the same time the Muslim religion undeniably has an influence on their culture and government. In a similar manner the US culture and government are influenced by Christianity.

In no way did I mean to imply that everything culturally American is Christian. (Personally I’m a Pastafarian and an ordained Dudists priest.) However, to me, many things about American government and culture seem drawn from religion. Swearing in officials with hand on bible, In God we trust, biggest federal holidays are Christian. (yeah, they stole them from pagan religions but that’s another story), can’t sell liquor on Sundays, churches don’t pay taxes, Santa Clause, The Easter bunny, etc.

I don’t approve of these things I’m just observing them.

My most sincere apologies for leaving the following out of my three sentence blog post response: Muslims, Jews, atheists, Pastafarians, humanists, satanists, Dudists, Quakers, Science Fiction fans, Californians, Mole people, Hipsters, Hippies, Beatniks, Millenials, Potterites, cult members, Mormons, Juggalos, conspiracy theorists, boxer guys, Scientologists, brief guys, Punks, Emos, Goths, IT people, smooth jazz fans and any other contributors to the culture and traditions of the great Unites States.

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Do you happen to know what a death note is?

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The staying on your home planet thing makes some sense, we never see much civilian FTL transport (Though a drug dealer, uhm, smuggler has one of the fastest ships around. Damnit, makes sense as well.). But the complete lack of media or any archives outside the Jedi temple are a really weird quirk. I know, it’s LOTR with light sabres, but it amuses me. Even in Ep II, when we see the supposedly marvelous Jedi archives with a missing planet, I just want to slap the head librarian a bit. How has noone noticed this gap? A missing planet with a perfectly regular populace and a giant frigging clone army!

We don’t know yet what Discovery will bring (damn we know little about that show), but I’d really welcome some civilian spacetravel. The Federation is supposed to be post-scarcity (though maybe not at that time yet), why wouldn’t people have their own ship? Of course, then the Enterprise wouldn’t need to Uber every second week to start the plot…

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I think in both settings, these baffling aspects are surprisingly realistic - the main limiting factor is related to energy. In both cases energy is theoretically boundless and free, but literally everything else is a big enough bottleneck that in practice free energy does not mean unlimited resources for all.

The lack of news and media in Star Wars can be explained by there apparently not existing any robust interplanetary communications networking technology - not an unrealistic limitation. The primary means of conveying information is via couriers, and though I joked about travel being instantaneous it is implied that it takes some fairly significant amount of time to cross the galaxy (a few days of travel to most destinations I would guess). For most planets it would be like a distant colonial outpost during the age of sail - it could be months between ships from home arriving with the “latest” news.

This is of course now completely off topic, but still interesting to think about. And actually, maybe not completely irrelevant - it shows how easy it is to justify or rationalize anything that doesn’t strike you quite right at first. For us that means explaining away potential inconsistencies in science fiction… for a lot of the population it means ignoring the flashing warning signs in Trump’s administration :slight_smile:

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I’ve got a little list…

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i agree entirely. i just don’t think we should allow the false idea that this is a christian nation with christian values to creep into people’s psyche.

human morality and law pre-date islam, christianity, and judaism. we don’t need those religions to be moral, nor just.

some quick rejoinders:

that’s the choice of the person, not a fixed part of the ceremony. some presidents have chosen law books instead. the “so help me god” at the end is convention, and not part of the actual constitutional vow.

first, i’d argue that it isn’t another story. that’s the same story. ( see, re: the easter bunny. ) more to the point, though: you’re wrong!

the only federal holiday which comes from christianity is christmas, and we do in fact exchange gifts ala the magi. ( it’s a thing. fortunately, most people recognize there are other winter holidays, some also with gift-giving at about the same time. ) the rest are holidays like labor day, new year’s day, independence day, etc.

non-profits don’t pay taxes either, other than employee taxes. and minsters have to pay those taxes for their church. so it’s about even. also: the rules apply to ANY religion.

just like the pledge of allegiance this is modern history. ( thanks but no thanks eisenhower. )

these are definitively non-christian. it’s actually, for what i see, why they’ve gained wide acceptance.

something like ash on ash wednesday or purple on good friday – which are explicitly and only christian – have remained wholly inside the religious community and aren’t parts of wider american culture.

and something like halloween, which christian leaders continually to try to stamp out, lives on.

i agree that dry-counties and no-liquor on sundays comes from christian morality. thank god :wink: it’s not federal, but state and local law, and isn’t true where i live.

what i think is that you grew up somewhere in the country where people are very religious. southern baptist area maybe. if so, your view of the country even after moving might be seen through that lens. ( and it’s certainly the lens christian conservatives want people to use. )

it’s not accurate. people in the us come from all walks of life, and have their own – separate – a/religious stories. the framework of government we have was meant to encourage this. our strength – if we have any at all – comes from that diversity.

the powers that be are currently challenging our diversity. trying to remake the country into something it’s not. they win when people start believing what they’re peddling.

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Nope, not from the south, didn’t grow up in a very religious family or community.

Although you make some good points I think we will just have to disagree on this topic.

I imagine we’ve hijacked this thread enough for one day.

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It looks to me like they’re trying to have it both ways. The Constitution page on whitehouse.gov has the simplified version of the Bill of Rights which uses the word citizen(s) instead of person or people. You can click through from that page to a full accurate version of the Constitution on senate.gov.

If one tries to claim that they have modified the constitution, they can quite accurately say that, no, we haven’t changed a word of it. You can find a link to it right here on the constitution page of whitehouse.gov. Of course, very few people will ever bother to do that…

ETA: Didn’t notice I was so late on this one.

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I’ve got a blank space baby…

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I had been wondering if minority Muslim sects within the seven countries could be considered minority religions for the EO’s purposes. It seems like they could be based on the text, even if that is undoubtedly not the intention.

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Very true. Much like it’s been said also that superheroes are the American equivalent of Greco-Roman Gods and Heroes… unfortunately President Delirium Tremens seems to see himself as a God on Olympus now.

Heck, he even wore a cape-sized coat at his inauguration. It looked utterly ridiculous, in fact I was reminded of the Simpsons episode where Homer claims obesity disability and goes about in a kind of dress.

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