How is this news? They are in the same war together on the same side. I would be more shocked if they didn’t communicate with each other regularly.

You would think Catholics would be absolutely outraged by this but the pope, who before was totally taboo to ever criticize, has been getting lots of criticism from Catholics for a long time now, ever since pope Francis was elected and but especially now with pope Leo. Ironically the absolutely fiercest critics of the pope are the so called “tradcaths” or ultra conservative catholic zoomers. If you look at their social media bubble it’s shit thrown at whatever the pope is saying every single week.

I don’t think US conservative Catholics care at all what Trump is saying about the pope. They hate the pope themselves. Maybe they will even cheer on.

It absolutely states that being gay is a grave sin and even calls for death for them in the old testament. However the message of Jesus in the new testament is one of radical forgiveness and non-judgement. Jesus is not afraid of those who commit sexual sins as seen by one of his companions being a prostitute. Jesus says to love everyone, forgive everyone and only hate the sin itself, but not the sinner. Judging a person is also considered a grave sin, something many modern christians have forgotten.

Therefore there is absolutely a theological basis for allowing homosexuals to attend church, following Jesus example of himself hanging out with prostitutes, another kind of sexual sinner. And since Jesus tells you to love everyone and judge no one there is no reason to hate or shun a gay person. This also applies to other sins. If you rob a bank you can still go to church as well, with the same argument.

However if you talk to a priest or pastor of a liberal LGBTQ affirming church and ask them if gays are allowed in the church they will shout a resounding yes. But if you press them on the question of if homosexual intercourse is a sin or not they will probably get uncomfortable and may give another answer. It’s a very hard biblical reality to deny.

However since you could in theory be gay and have a same sex partner and just simply not have sex with them you could give gay couples the benefit of the doubt. This is the basis for allowing gay marriage. However gay marriage stands on much more shakier grounds than simply allowing LGBTQs in the church, since marriage in the bible is explicitly stated as being between a man and a woman. Some prists/pastors however take a different route to justifying it and that involves reasoning that since God created all humans and some humans are gay, those people most have been created gay by god himself, and everything that God creates is good, therefore gays are good. This argument requires some reasoning outside the Bible but is used by many. Conservatives can attack such a stance saying it directly goes against direct bible quotes while also claiming one is not born gay but you turn gay by your own decision or others influence. Gayness would in this view be a free will sin rather than a god creates attribute.

I’m writing this comment as a non Christian who supports LGBTQ btw. Just trying to explain what I know about the discussion.

Many german dialects are as you say, sometimes unintelligible with each other. However they are of the type where if you spend 1-2 weeks immersed in it you will very quickly start to understand it. Same thing happens in English. I heard an anecdote of someone who watched the Scottish series “Lemmy’s show” for the first time and could barely understand anything they were saying. But as they reached the end of the first season they had very little trouble. Intrigued I did the same and had the same experience (great show btw).

I’m not native speaker of German but I had such an experience. I learnt standard German in school as a foreign language. Last year I visited the Austrian family of my partner. The first day I could barely understand anything they were saying but after 2 weeks I could comprehend most of it. So where do we really draw the lines of a language? If you can comprehend it with less than one week of training is it really a language? I would say no. If yes then I would say some English dialects ought to be classified as languages (as I know some do, calling it the scots language).

Before this the only ships let through were the ones that were OKed by iran. You could be OKed by iran either if you were going there to buy and transport Iranian oil or if you paid Iran a huge fee. Either way Iran was making huge amounts of money on this especially since the oil prices were so high and they were the only ones able to export oil from the region.

So this recent move of blocking the straight completely is not a dumb move if one wants to weaken iran. There were headlines going around saying Iran was making more money during the war than before the war. Such a situation of course meant iran is in no hurry whatsoever to sign a peace deal with the US, especially not a disadvantageous one.

This new blockade will however highen oil prices even more now that not even Iranian oil can leave. But this will put pressure on Iran towards making peace deal. If a peace deal is met the strait can be completely open again and oil prices can start going down. That’s the thought behind it. We’ll see if it actually works. It doesn’t look like Iran is too desperate to sign a peace deal and why would they? They can probably handle not exporting oil for a longer time than Trump can politically survive constantly increasing fuel prices and inflation. And they know that fact. The Iranian leadership are crazy religious fanatics but they don’t strike me as stupid.

Hi I made the original comment. After I posted I saw that the thread was a repost and that all the comments were on the original thread. Seeing as the original was already quite old and thinking the repost would not take off I just deleted my comment and moved on. So I was very surprised to see this replied to later. I would undelete it if I could.

Well I can reply back anyway. You gave a very detailed description on how wealth inequality appears and you explained a lot of basic economic theory. It’s a great comment but I don’t think we actually disagree. My point is not that wealth inequality is a non-issue. Of course it’s a huge issue. But these headlines which say that the top x% has as much wealth as the bottom x% are close to meaningless for two reasons. One is that a huge amount of people have 0 wealth without necessarily being poor or having a low standard of living. This can be because of having student loans or from voluntarily not saving. It can also be people who are too young to have meaningfully saved anything. How many of these people with zero or close to zero wealth are actually poor? I don’t know so these metrics don’t say anything to me. Say 20% of the world population has 0 or negative wealth. Then I can say that the homeless man with 1 dollar in his pocket has more wealth than the bottom 20% of the world population. Would be a true statement but ultimately meaningless.

As income inequality is the true source of wealth inequality I prefer discussions about that. But if wealth inequality specifically is to be discussed, which it has all right to be, then a metric like the “top x% wealthiest own x% of the world wealth” is much preferable. A metric like that is actually understandable immediately and says much more about how unequal the wealth distribution is. The metric in this headline I see as sensationalism.

Oh and by the way land can absolutely be both rented out and sold. In many countries renting land is the main way to expand your farm as owners seldom want to sell their land. I work in agriculture so I often give agricultural analogies. Sorry if it wasn’t easy to understand. Though I admit I don’t know the specifics in Laos.

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They are by any metric very dense. According to population by area they are right between India and the Philippines, both highly dense countries. Another way would be by hectares of arable land per capita which would roughly indicate how large a population their agriculture could support. According to this they rank 137th and rank below countries like Japan and Norway, both known for being severely deficient in farmland. Only reason Israel gets by with their surprisingly high food self sufficiency is their use of highly advanced agricultural technology and intensive use of irrigation from both the Jordan river and desalination plants. However they are still unable to produce all the food they need and need imports.

The fact is that Israel is very small, especially for their population size. Occupying more land in Palestine and the Golan heights have therefore made strategic sense. And with the high fertility rate constantly increasing their population the land deficiency will only increase without occupying more territory. Look at Israel on satellite you quickly see how villages, towns and cities occupy a huge percentage of their land and this urban development is encroaching on their already limited farmland.