Ah, I see. We don’t tend to put it to the mouth. It’s more “fuck you”. Apparently comes from demonstrating to the French that you still have your bow-drawing fingers and intend to use them. British archers captured by the french would have their first two fingers removed to prevent them launching arrows.

In the UK two fingers up is a rude gesture and it comes from battles with the french. If they caught a British archer they removed those fingers so they couldn’t fire a bow. So sticking them up at the enemy and gesturing was showing they had them and would use them to fire arrows at them. I am not an historian, though, and this could just be one of those tales that sounds so true everyone believes it and passes it on.

We do? Can you describe the gesture? Maybe it’s so ingrained I don’t even recognise it. Or I need to learn it. Then I can use it at everyone today.

Yeah, I agree. I was just trying to clarify the intent of the comment.

But also I think that’s the point of that line of debate. It is an attempt to show a religious stance from an atheist perspective in which belief is a while load of possible strange things accepted as true. It’s not really much use other than when you’re faced with someone who things your lack of theism is the opposite of their particular brand of religion and frames the discussion around which bits you have issue with, as if they might prove to you that you’re wrong. Or to show that their belief that their religion is correct and all the others, including atheism, are the wrong ones, isn’t really the other side of what an atheist thinks.

More a thought experiment than meant to characterise the entirety of atheism.

I quite like them. And I don’t mind Jehovah’s witnesses. I can ignore or politely send them away without much hassle. But I think it’s nice that they believe they can save people and actively try to do so. If I believed, I hope I would be a good enough person to try to save everyone else, too.

Of course, this doesn’t apply to people who are trying to force people or demand poor treatment of people with different beliefs. It really depends where it comes from.

That’s what they’re saying. An atheist believes in 0 of the total options for gods and religions that you get if you add them all up. A believer believes in 1 or a few of them. So really, the religious are also non-believers when it comes to most gods and religions.

He has a wife, you know…

(Next server name: Incontinentia Buttocks)

As long as there’s a system, I think they’re useful. You can argue they weight things incorrectly but it’s useful to have some way to see how a country does against the same evaluation for rest of the world. I don’t know if this is the best data, but I don’t see anything that pops out as particularly odd.

At the bottom, it’s not much between NK and the two below. But the two below are Myanmar and Afghanistan, which I don’t think is too crazy.

I certainly never intended to silence discussion. I’d have said I was opening up the discussion, if anything, by poi ting out that there’s some data available that suggests the USA is far from the most democratic nation. Which, as I read it, was a tongue in cheek statement in the comment I replied to.

But, now it is being discussed, I’m interested in the view that monarchy should have a paeticylarly large negative weight on the ranking. I’m not a royalist and think any monarchy with even a hint of power means less than absolute democracy. But I don’t think many of the monarchies in those high ranking countries have as much of a negative impact as other factors that can reduce the input of a population to the democratic process. The big one for me would be how individual voting gets weighted.

Most democratic country is Norway.

USA is at position 26.

https://wisevoter.com/country-rankings/most-democratic-countries/

I think if you found the shop magically disappeared the next day after selling only the things people were looking for, no matter how random, it would make more sense.

Maybe they only sold drugs because someone wanted some.

Feels like the article is channeling Zoolander. What is this? A hospital for virtual people?

Seems like a virtual tour is a good idea, tbh.

Twisting the promise, barely making any progress on it and shafting the NHS, now, that’s not so good.

The EEE strategy would lead to the big corporate entity being the way most people interact. New users would go there instead of other platforms to engage. In time, a lot of the users and content would be on the corporate platform because it’s the one that has the most reach, marketing, etc. so defederation would be a big hit.

As others have pointed out: sending a DM from wefwef appears to be a no-go. Is there a rallying point somehwere? A lemmy community, discord channel? I’m interested in being involved but not sure how much time I can commit so would rather throw some effort at something that’s got others already coordinating rather than start something that falters everytime work gets in my way.

I’m just starting out with lemmy myself but have decades of experience with tech and work in higher education, so might be best placed working on educational aspects. My plan at the moment is to set up something small dedicated to self hosted services with a focus on containerised deployment and low maintainence effort. Documenting that journey might be useful?

Glad I read this comment, finally. I just spent 10 minutes trying to work out how to send a DM and assuming it was just me not being used to a new app and missing it.