Quite a problem for the US too when it loses all our tax income then. Tens of thousands of Americans are dual citizens and live in other countries, still obliged to pay US taxes.

Sorry, not the atheist virtue part but valuing emotions, sexuality, the body [etc] & deconstructing overweening claims of reason without being ‘irrationalist’.
(I’m taking seriously your argument that this paves the way for reconsidering the status of virtuous atheism.)

Johann Georg Hamann also influential in this.

Think how much tax revenue they would lose from 10s of thousands of US citizens abroad, who decided to keep the citizenship of the country they live in; and who currently have to pay US tax.

I think it does depend on the variety - this was a pretty robust Abyssinian type!

Well... I had a banana tree that thrived outside year round in London, unprotected. One hot summer it produced a hand of bananas (but too late in the year to ripen). We eventually had to cut it down because it was taken over our small garden.
I believe you!

Yes!

Death at the direction of the president is not a legitimate consequence for exercising a first amendment right.

It’s hard to believe that this needs to be said.

As the Scottish say, his head’s full of wee doors and they’re all slamming.
(translated into south-of-the-border English)

This is the best thing I have ever seen on Bluesky.
I love sheep. But even if I didn’t, the ALT TEXT captions would still make it the best thing I have ever seen on Bluesky.

Agree, but beyond ‘only’ the character issue, something more inalterable: [arguably may be a] personality disorder, one or more: narcissistic PD, or sociopathy, or psychopathy - so there may be both a ‘chosen’ moral dimension to the dysfunction but also a deeper, even more frightening pathology.

Were the members of the jury able to keep a straight face through all this?

Nice!

Yeah, that’s what really struck me. Also in the correspondence. I (philosopher) was explaining how you’d have to study this empirically, and he (scientist) was doing weird thought experiments ‘I can imagine *all* Catholic priests are trained in psychological torture, therefore...'

Yup. Not overtly hostile, I should say, after the first ‘hateful’; but trying to argue the case. I couldn’t believe it, not least that he would spend the time on it (my husband said he didn’t have enough work to do!) Also the poor quality of his reasoning. Wish I’d kept the emails…

Dawkins wrote that being raised Catholic does more harm to children than child sexual abuse (letter to a newspaper). I objected (letter to same paper) and simply asked for some evidence of this. His response was to call me hateful, and he emailed me daily for about a week (at my uni workplace).

From Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison, Prologue. After Ten Years [written in 1942-43, lessons learned from 10 years of Nazism.]

'But these thoughts about stupidity also offer consolation in that
they utterly forbid us to consider the majority of people to be stupid in every circumstance. It really will depend on whether those in power expect more from peoples’ stupidity than from their inner independence and wisdom.’ 12/13