> In fact in Judeo-Christian thinking, to do this requires people receiving a "new heart, a heart of flesh instead of a heart of stone" from God. (I saw "Judeo-" because the passages is from Ezekiel, which is common to both. I do not know if rabbinical thinking agrees, however.)
It doesn't. Judaism holds that the soul starts out pure, having been made in the image of G-d, and it only becomes impure through wrongdoing. All humans are born with an impulse to do evil, the Yetzer Hara, but we're also created with the power to overcome it. And when we have done evil, we have the ability to atone and return our souls to the pure state they were created in. That happens, for instance, on Yom Kippur.
The context of the verse from Ezekiel is:
> O mortal, when the House of Israel dwelt on their own soil, they defiled it with their ways and their deeds […] So I poured out My wrath on them […] I scattered them among the nations […] But when they came to those nations, they caused My holy name to be profaned, in that it was said of them, “These are GOD’s people, yet they had to leave their land.” […] Say to the House of Israel: Thus said the Sovereign GOD: Not for your sake will I act, O House of Israel, but for My holy name, which you have caused to be profaned among the nations to which you have come. […] I will take you from among the nations and gather you from all the countries, and I will bring you back to your own land. I will sprinkle pure water upon you, and you shall be purified: I will purify you from all your defilement and from all your fetishes. And I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit into you: I will remove the heart of stone from your body and give you a heart of flesh;" https://www.sefaria.org/Ezekiel.36.17-26
Ezekiel lived during the Babylonian exile. At face value, the text is saying that the people of Israel have been exiled because of their sins, but it makes a prophecy that G-d will cause them to stop sinning and return them to their land. That eventually did happen under Cyrus the Great. This is a constant cycle in the bible: When things are good, the Israelites forget G-d's teachings. Then something bad happens, but G-d redeems the Israelites from their suffering, which leads them to follow G-d again. Then thing get good again, and they start to forget G-d once more...
When it says that G-d will give the house of Israel a new heart, it's not (at face value) saying that individual people will literally receive new spirits (or otherwise be metaphysically transformed). Nor is it saying that G-d will literally sprinkle water on them. These are poetic ways of saying that the house of Israel will stop worshiping idols (etc), the same way that happened many times before in the Torah. You can of course add a layer of exegesis and make it about individual believers today instead of the nation of Israel in Babylonia of the 6th-century BCE. That's fine, the rabbinic tradition does that sort of thing all the time too. But at that point you're firmly in Christian territory and not in the space shared between Judaism and Christianity.
TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) are generally left-wing, despite holding a reactionary view on trans people. That sort of comes with the territory of being a radical feminist. If someone is right-wing, or even just a centrist liberal feminist, then they're just an ordinary transphobe, not a TERF.
While you may be right by academic classification, most TERF studies I've seen and most notable TERF accounts on X are almost exclusively far right-wing, because it is an inherently conservative stance even if the grounding starting position is more socially progressive.
TERFs outed themselves as exclusionary. As such, they can't be left wing, even if they would like to align with it on some other principles. You can't be humanistic only towards some humans.
We're "exclusionary" in the sense that we want males be excluded from spaces intended for women and girls, yes. This is entirely compatible with left-wing political views.
An optimistic explanation is that they don't want to be antisemitic. The present-day term for "Pharisee" is "Jew." The early rabbis who created Judaism as we know it were Pharisees, and theirs was the only first-century Jewish sect which survived until today. You can even see the alternation between "Pharisee" and "Jew" in The New Testament. For instance, in some verses it criticizes the Pharisees for washing their hands before eating, whereas in others it levies the same complaint against Jews generally: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke%2011%3A38%...
In the schools I'm familiar with, this isn't really a skill that's taught. The emphasis is on carrying out steps correctly on paper. Making a good estimate without showing work would definitely be frowned upon.
In Germany this was part of the physics curriculum.
It made sense since order-of-magnitude estimations constantly come up naturally in all fields of physics, whether you are asking "is this plausibly possible", "what kind of instrument do I need for this measurement" (and later "can we even measure this in this setup") or "are the results of my experiment plausible". There's a reason we joke that to the physicist g=10 and pi=3.
It's difficult to test this kind of thinking in a written test without turning it into something entirely different, but not everything in school has to be on a test. Typically half of our marks were made up from classroom participation.
Taking the steps multiple times (practicing) will make it fast and trustful.
Guessing may get you a part of the way if you're very good at it, but repeatability is what really hammers it into you. It also gets you out of trouble when for any reason your guessing instinct is not at full steam (when tired or otherwise incapacitated, anxious, etc) since you can usually relatively quickly rely on the steps you have drilled for.
> pretty loyal Pokemon fans despite being in their 30's
Pokémon is 28 years old, so people now in their 30s would have been the core demographic of Pokémon fans at the start. I would expect them to be the most loyal fans, no "despite" needed.
> How is this any different than Digimon?
The criticism I've seen is of specific creature designs that look very close to those of specific Pokémon. I don't particularly care about that either – but the criticism is not just that it's another mon collection game.
Games certainly have social value, but I'm not convinced that better graphics contribute all that much. I've not played Factorio, but looking at screenshots it seems not to have particularly advanced graphics. Indeed, I still get a lot of enjoyment out of 20-year-old games and often wish that modern games had less sophisticated graphics so they would run better.
To some extent, graphics are important because with extremely primitive graphics, like the graphics of the NES, it can get difficult to tell what things are represented by the image, and the limited color palette presents a challenge in making the game look aesthetically pleasing.
A game doesn't need the most advanced graphics to look aesthetically pleasing, though. It can be made up for by using an art style that doesn't need powerful hardware, e.g. modern pixel art, or the simplistic, cartoonish look that 3D Nintendo games use. Mirror's Edge still looks great due to its art direction and use of techniques like precomputed lighting.
However, different people have different standards. I've been really enjoying playing the game Crypt of the Necrodancer, and I think the pixel art is also pretty good and aesthetically pleasing, but when I showed the game to my friend to see if he might like it, he rejected it because "the art didn't speak to him." Evidently, compared to me, he has a higher minimum for graphics in order for a game to be fun for him.
This group said that previous attacks on state government offices this past summer were motivated by bans on gender-affirming healthcare for minors [1]. Idaho is among the states that have passed such a ban [2], but afaik the group hasn't attributed this most recent attack to it -- they've attacked many targets across the world for various not-particularly-convincing reasons. In any case, the breach data here seems unlikely to be particularly dangerous -- the article says that they leaked employees addresses and SSNs.
Drag queen story time seems completely unrelated to this story.
