On Oct. 7, the Department of Homeland Security and Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a joint statement on behalf of the U.S. Intelligence Community. The USIC is made up of 16 agencies, in addition to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
"The U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations. The recent disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks and by the Guccifer 2.0 online persona are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts. These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process. Such activity is not new to Moscow—the Russians have used similar tactics and techniques across Europe and Eurasia, for example, to influence public opinion there. We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia's senior-most officials could have authorized these activities."
Here is the full statement if you want: https://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/press-releases/215-press-releases-2016/1423-joint-dhs-odni-election-security-statement
There are good journalists out there. They just happen to be mostly independent media organizations. Self-funded or crowd funded.
It is absolutely the job of the media to both present facts as well as help the audience understand what the implications of those facts are in our day to day lives. The average voter will never be able to translate the flood of facts at their fingerprints into an action plan without help.
A majority percentage of this country will always be unable to think critically, and will likely always read at about a 6 grade level.
If you want to make a difference, support independent media. Support education in general.
Or you can deliver a highly selected set of them to the plant via whatever irrigation method you use. My father and I have been working with freeze dried bacteria that can be re-constituted and applied to any crop. Over 10,000 acres now. The 'good bacteria' we've surrounded the plant with block out other bad bacteria/disease vectors, as well as fix atmospheric nitrogen, increase carbon mass in the soil, give the roots a big head start early in the grow season, etc..
And none of this is GMO, so we avoid that 'debate'. http://www.bridgetownorganics.com/ . It isn't very well known though. Many farmers look at us skeptically when we say this little pinky finger size vial of white powder can fertilize 12 acres:), but it works.
It will be interesting to see how the combination of the these finding will work with the stuff I've mentioned above. I'm a little unclear where the additional proteins were added based on the article though. Added to the plant? Added to the bacteria in the nodules?
You seem to think it is possible for some 'bad guy' to go door to door and force people to fill out ballots in his favor, and to do so in such large enough numbers to influence an election, and at the same time, none of the people the 'bad guy' threatened come forward to the police...
That seems so highly unlikely it is laughable.
Any sort of fraud that requires you to impersonate people, one by one, or intimidate voters one by one, is just way too inefficient to influence an election.
And it is equally liked by both parties: The poll also shows high favorability among both registered Democrats (85%) and Republicans (76%). from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vote-by-mail_in_Oregon
It has worked quite well in Oregon. http://www.ktvz.com/news/central-oregon/despite-easy-voter-access-voter-fraud-deemed-rare-in-oregon/69175638
There is no guarantee that the midpoint between a conservative's viewpoint and a liberal's viewpoint on an issue is the position that most accurately represents reality. And while I'd guess you didn't mean that literally, throwing phrases around like that reinforces the false notion that "middle ground" is what a reasonable person should believe.
Sometimes one side is just plain wrong. Sometimes there really are things called facts. Sometimes controversies are real, sometimes they are made up.
It is hard to escape the mindset of left/right, us/them, when the news constantly reinforces the notion. Every news show has a pro-guest and an anti-guest. And for a subject like climate change, that makes viewers think an issue is 50/50. Which isn't true most of the time. Most of the time there is a real actual answer to a question.
But most politicians are admittedly not concerned with truth, they are concerned with perception and manipulating it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnhJWusyj4I
Donald Trump has struck a nerve with the american people. It's sad that he was the one to figure out how, but he did.
Most career politicians, and most political science majors, know exactly how Donald did it. Any of them could have done it, but they would not stoop that low.
Donald is using demagoguery (an appeal to people that plays on their emotions and prejudices rather than on their rational side), in the exact same style as many authoritarian dictators have used in the past. Blame "others" for perceived problems that may or may not exist, demonize the "others", etc.. He is able to stoop much lower than any other politician because he is a textbook narcissist likely with psychopathic tendencies, according to a Harvard Psychology Prof. http://countercurrentnews.com/2016/02/psychologist-explains-trump-is-literally-a-narcissistic-psychopath/
His real skill is not that he discovered demagoguery, his real skill is media manipulation. Namely, his ability to say a whole bunch of stuff that elicits emotion (dog whistles for instance) without actual saying anything. News anchors can pin him down and make him say anything concrete. He just dances around issues, which allows the viewer to fill in their interpretation of what he said.
Did you see The Office episode where Jim "helps" Dwight with his speech by replacing the words in a Mussolini speech with whatever was relevant in this day and age for the topic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzE7lXM6mho
Most citizens are unable to grasp the implications of complex situations, even if they had all the facts delivered to them in a non-biased way.
The news certainly should attempt to inform people why fact X matters and what it might mean to our real world lives. I wish we had a non-profit news source, funded by the public, who's charter was to deliver the facts in an unbiased way, explain them in an unbiased way to that people understood what is at stake, and also reported on bad reporting, called out people telling lies, etc..
Unfortunately, saying things like "evolution isn't real, god did it" is considered factual by 50% of congressional house members (whether they truly believe it or not is another thing). So good luck implementing a neutral news company. The second the public funded news says something like "The Earth is X billions of years old", it is labeled a liberal lie. Or "The Earth is warming and the primary cause is man", the news company would be labeled as some sort of agenda driven biased liberal news source.
Maybe before we decide we need less editorializing, we should first decide what the actual facts are about the world? The US can't even get that far.
I love how people talk about natural selection as if we weren't part of it.
People tend to talk about natural selection as one of SLOW processes that drives evolution. Humans are capable of changing the environment at a pace that the rest of nature cannot cope with through evolutionary means. In that sense, we are outside and apart from the rest of the planet's natural world.
The cutting down of forests in the middle east thousands of years ago is one factor that led to much of it being an arid desert wasteland. Of course humans can shape the climate with or without co2 emissions. What is your point?
Let's be honest here, if we wanted to do something about global warming, we'd have to change our way of life. And we'd have to change it big time.
Proof. You people that are basically saying "ahh its too hard to change, we'd have to give up too much" need to provide some proof or just be quiet. It is a constant talking point with zero evidence backing it up. In fact the opposite...
Countries that are more aggressively moving to clean energy are not experiencing painful reductions in lifestyle. We have tons of real world f'ing examples of it being easy to change. Why are you ignoring them?
In fact, we have tons of real world examples of countries moving faster than us to clean energy, and it stimulating their economy with new construction jobs, new infrastructure jobs, etc..
People have been duped, they are buying cheap disposable, breakable goods,
It is sort of chicken vs egg problem.
Stagnant wages for the last 30 years means the average US citizen has a lot less buying power. Did people start making cheaper products because that is all Americans could afford?
Did people start demanding cheaper things, so those people effectively outsourced their own jobs overseas.... or did the outsourcing for higher profits happen first, and people ended up only being able to afford the cheap stuff.
I tend to think that people didn't do this to themselves. All the outsourcing and shipping jobs overseas in a race to the bottom was the natural result of how corporate goals and policies have changed over time to be fast-profit, quarter based decision making.
Not to mention that nobody talks about positive effects of global warming... will increased atmospheric moisture turn the southwest or the sahara into arable land? We don't really know.
Except "they do" talk about it. Most studies conclude that yes, some areas will have more favorable climates, but that overall things will get worse. Mixed bad and good, but more bad overall.
Maybe when you say "nobody talks about (it)" you are referring to politicians and the media? Then yeah, those people tend to focus on the negatives, because it gets more attention.
But the "they" that matters, the scientists, they are very much studying the pro/cons of changing climate.
The government's job isn't to be heavy handed. It is to insure that we are all playing by the same sets of rules.
But this case isn't giving Uber Driver regulations, but just taking them to support the competitors who have a bunch of regulations.
Now as I see it, the Government should be doing either the following. Lessening the regulations on Taxi Companies so they can be more competitive. Or Giving Ride Sharing services regulations to insure safety and standards are met to match the Taxi Services.
Or option C) build out their public transportation so taxis and uber weren't needed (as much). That is the reason they regulated taxis in the first place: they gave taxis a monopoly in exchange for acting as an extension to public transit (can't refuse to pick someone up, can't avoid poor neighborhoods, etc..).
You know that taxi services are treated much like an extension of a city's public transit right?
Taxis were given artificial monopolies if, and only if, they agreed to operate under certain rules. For instance, taxis cannot refuse to pick you up just because you live in a poor neighborhood or because you live too far from city center.
The taxi business, for many cities but not all, acts as an extension to public transit, allowing elderly people on the outskirts of town, or people in poorer neighborhoods, some way to get to their doctors appointment, or some way to make it to a job interview.
Uber doesn't want to follow those rules. Their drivers want to hang around the most lucrative spots, usually downtown business areas, and can refuse to come pick someone up if it is too far away.
In a perfect world, cities would build out their public transit better, but cost/time/competing priorities have always been an issue.
I'm curious (and a bit hopeful) to see whether systemd can provide the necessary functionality without extensive custom scripting.
That is what I'm mostly curious about as well. If systemd just makes me re-write all my scripts, but their verbosity doesn't diminish, I'm not sure what I've gained.
Like you, I've got systems with network mounts, database and ldap dependencies, etc.. scripts can help automate a lot of it, but it isn't perfect. I hope systemd can make multi-dependency shutdown/startups easier, and it doesn't turn out to just be a different way of doing things that ends up just as complex.
I've read next to nothing about systemd yet, the answer might already exist.
One nice thing about the VM, like if you use virtualbox, is you can snapshot (backup) the vm before trying updates out. If they break something, you can just rollback to the prior image.
My only lack of understanding in this matter is why so many people aren't capable of understanding more than one Operating system. Laziness?
I am a system analyst. 20+ years of it now. Jack of all trades, programming, hardware, networking, etc..
I just don't want to come home and have to spend another hour or two tinkering with something. I want a toaster at home that plays my games, plays my tv shows, and doesn't mess up for years. I have a mixed environment at home (linux, mac, and and pc), but I'm not beholden to any of them. Whatever works is what I want. When I get the urge to tinker or explore on a computer, I want it to be the fun stuff: learning a new language, playing with a framework, etc.. Fixing your linux/windows box because an upgrade broke the video driver feels like a chore now. It didn't when I was younger and still learning. But by the 100th broken driver...
For the rest of the mainstream average computer users, I agree with Immerman: "efficiency of familiarity". People get used to something at home, at work, and at friends houses, and they tend to stick with what "feels right". No more complex than that.
It is the old 'say something enough times and it becomes true' deal. If people continually stream half-truths, mistruths, and outright lies, it can effectively shift the overton window one direction or another for a group of voters. Truth can work as well, but people using purely factual/logical arguments don't tend to get as much airtime.
So if I wanted to convince people to vote for Trump, I might point out that amnesty for 14 million illegals will bring unemployment to 20% and decrease job security, then ask if there's any other issue that's more important to them than their own job security.
I don't think even that would work in modern politics. People, especially people with low information sets to begin with, feel like everyone is always just making up stats left and right. They are not going to believe any numbers or statements. They instead, are only going to trust someone if they believe that person is in the same "camp" with them ideologically.
Most people cannot evaluate the credibility of a source. All they see is a constant stream of facts or lies, with no way to verify any of it.
Some of the things said by candidates in this election have been so extreme, that if you have a friend that believes those things, it can be extremely telling about their true inner feelings. New information about someone that contradicts your core philosophies isn't a bad reason to end a friendship.
I mean, there comes a time when you can't just keeping making certain subjects taboo to talk about with a friend/relative, in order to sustain the relationship. Things like "no politics at thanksgiving" are OK. But with 'Friend A', 'no politics, no philosophy, no meaning of life, no religion, no foreign policy, etc. '. Sometimes there are just too many "no's".
Some beliefs do deserve to be ridiculed because they are over the top stupid. Other beliefs do deserve to be argued against forcefully because they are detrimental to our society. And some beliefs do deserve to be debated politely, because there are differences of philosophy, and each camp has a valid argument.
Where exactly you draw the line is somewhat subjective. From your description, it sounds like your friend is over the line. But I guess it depends on what he/she is trying to accomplish. Maybe they are at a point where they do not want to keep any friends that belief in certain things they hate.
Slashdot Mirror
On Oct. 7, the Department of Homeland Security and Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a joint statement on behalf of the U.S. Intelligence Community. The USIC is made up of 16 agencies, in addition to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
"The U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations. The recent disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks and by the Guccifer 2.0 online persona are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts. These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process. Such activity is not new to Moscow—the Russians have used similar tactics and techniques across Europe and Eurasia, for example, to influence public opinion there. We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia's senior-most officials could have authorized these activities."
Here is the full statement if you want:
https://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/press-releases/215-press-releases-2016/1423-joint-dhs-odni-election-security-statement
$5.45M is a small business?
There are good journalists out there. They just happen to be mostly independent media organizations. Self-funded or crowd funded.
It is absolutely the job of the media to both present facts as well as help the audience understand what the implications of those facts are in our day to day lives. The average voter will never be able to translate the flood of facts at their fingerprints into an action plan without help.
A majority percentage of this country will always be unable to think critically, and will likely always read at about a 6 grade level.
If you want to make a difference, support independent media. Support education in general.
The plants basically breed them.
Or you can deliver a highly selected set of them to the plant via whatever irrigation method you use. My father and I have been working with freeze dried bacteria that can be re-constituted and applied to any crop. Over 10,000 acres now. The 'good bacteria' we've surrounded the plant with block out other bad bacteria/disease vectors, as well as fix atmospheric nitrogen, increase carbon mass in the soil, give the roots a big head start early in the grow season, etc..
And none of this is GMO, so we avoid that 'debate'. http://www.bridgetownorganics.com/ . It isn't very well known though. Many farmers look at us skeptically when we say this little pinky finger size vial of white powder can fertilize 12 acres:), but it works.
It will be interesting to see how the combination of the these finding will work with the stuff I've mentioned above. I'm a little unclear where the additional proteins were added based on the article though. Added to the plant? Added to the bacteria in the nodules?
You seem to think it is possible for some 'bad guy' to go door to door and force people to fill out ballots in his favor, and to do so in such large enough numbers to influence an election, and at the same time, none of the people the 'bad guy' threatened come forward to the police...
That seems so highly unlikely it is laughable.
Any sort of fraud that requires you to impersonate people, one by one, or intimidate voters one by one, is just way too inefficient to influence an election.
And it is equally liked by both parties: The poll also shows high favorability among both registered Democrats (85%) and Republicans (76%). from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vote-by-mail_in_Oregon
It has worked quite well in Oregon.
http://www.ktvz.com/news/central-oregon/despite-easy-voter-access-voter-fraud-deemed-rare-in-oregon/69175638
"The average commenter here is now more right wing, less well informed, stupider and less fun."
I wonder how much of that is paid trolls? Especially around election time.
"Now if you are actually a person in the middle"
There is no guarantee that the midpoint between a conservative's viewpoint and a liberal's viewpoint on an issue is the position that most accurately represents reality. And while I'd guess you didn't mean that literally, throwing phrases around like that reinforces the false notion that "middle ground" is what a reasonable person should believe.
Sometimes one side is just plain wrong. Sometimes there really are things called facts. Sometimes controversies are real, sometimes they are made up.
It is hard to escape the mindset of left/right, us/them, when the news constantly reinforces the notion. Every news show has a pro-guest and an anti-guest. And for a subject like climate change, that makes viewers think an issue is 50/50. Which isn't true most of the time. Most of the time there is a real actual answer to a question.
But most politicians are admittedly not concerned with truth, they are concerned with perception and manipulating it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnhJWusyj4I
Donald Trump has struck a nerve with the american people. It's sad that he was the one to figure out how, but he did.
Most career politicians, and most political science majors, know exactly how Donald did it. Any of them could have done it, but they would not stoop that low.
Donald is using demagoguery (an appeal to people that plays on their emotions and prejudices rather than on their rational side), in the exact same style as many authoritarian dictators have used in the past. Blame "others" for perceived problems that may or may not exist, demonize the "others", etc.. He is able to stoop much lower than any other politician because he is a textbook narcissist likely with psychopathic tendencies, according to a Harvard Psychology Prof. http://countercurrentnews.com/2016/02/psychologist-explains-trump-is-literally-a-narcissistic-psychopath/
His real skill is not that he discovered demagoguery, his real skill is media manipulation. Namely, his ability to say a whole bunch of stuff that elicits emotion (dog whistles for instance) without actual saying anything. News anchors can pin him down and make him say anything concrete. He just dances around issues, which allows the viewer to fill in their interpretation of what he said.
Did you see The Office episode where Jim "helps" Dwight with his speech by replacing the words in a Mussolini speech with whatever was relevant in this day and age for the topic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzE7lXM6mho
Most citizens are unable to grasp the implications of complex situations, even if they had all the facts delivered to them in a non-biased way.
The news certainly should attempt to inform people why fact X matters and what it might mean to our real world lives. I wish we had a non-profit news source, funded by the public, who's charter was to deliver the facts in an unbiased way, explain them in an unbiased way to that people understood what is at stake, and also reported on bad reporting, called out people telling lies, etc..
Unfortunately, saying things like "evolution isn't real, god did it" is considered factual by 50% of congressional house members (whether they truly believe it or not is another thing). So good luck implementing a neutral news company. The second the public funded news says something like "The Earth is X billions of years old", it is labeled a liberal lie. Or "The Earth is warming and the primary cause is man", the news company would be labeled as some sort of agenda driven biased liberal news source.
Maybe before we decide we need less editorializing, we should first decide what the actual facts are about the world? The US can't even get that far.
Curious, why not this instead of having to also use tail:
find . -name "*.c" | wc -l
I love how people talk about natural selection as if we weren't part of it.
People tend to talk about natural selection as one of SLOW processes that drives evolution. Humans are capable of changing the environment at a pace that the rest of nature cannot cope with through evolutionary means. In that sense, we are outside and apart from the rest of the planet's natural world.
The cutting down of forests in the middle east thousands of years ago is one factor that led to much of it being an arid desert wasteland. Of course humans can shape the climate with or without co2 emissions. What is your point?
Let's be honest here, if we wanted to do something about global warming, we'd have to change our way of life. And we'd have to change it big time.
Proof. You people that are basically saying "ahh its too hard to change, we'd have to give up too much" need to provide some proof or just be quiet. It is a constant talking point with zero evidence backing it up. In fact the opposite...
Countries that are more aggressively moving to clean energy are not experiencing painful reductions in lifestyle. We have tons of real world f'ing examples of it being easy to change. Why are you ignoring them?
In fact, we have tons of real world examples of countries moving faster than us to clean energy, and it stimulating their economy with new construction jobs, new infrastructure jobs, etc..
People have been duped, they are buying cheap disposable, breakable goods,
It is sort of chicken vs egg problem.
Stagnant wages for the last 30 years means the average US citizen has a lot less buying power. Did people start making cheaper products because that is all Americans could afford?
Did people start demanding cheaper things, so those people effectively outsourced their own jobs overseas.... or did the outsourcing for higher profits happen first, and people ended up only being able to afford the cheap stuff.
I tend to think that people didn't do this to themselves. All the outsourcing and shipping jobs overseas in a race to the bottom was the natural result of how corporate goals and policies have changed over time to be fast-profit, quarter based decision making.
The earth has had climates in the past with CO2 concentrations 10x higher or more than current levels, and life was thriving.
Say it with me: rate of change, rate of change, rate of change....
Life can adapt to extreme conditions, but not as well when it is happening in a few hundred years instead of 10's of thousands of years.
Not to mention that nobody talks about positive effects of global warming... will increased atmospheric moisture turn the southwest or the sahara into arable land? We don't really know.
Except "they do" talk about it. Most studies conclude that yes, some areas will have more favorable climates, but that overall things will get worse. Mixed bad and good, but more bad overall.
Maybe when you say "nobody talks about (it)" you are referring to politicians and the media? Then yeah, those people tend to focus on the negatives, because it gets more attention.
But the "they" that matters, the scientists, they are very much studying the pro/cons of changing climate.
The government's job isn't to be heavy handed. It is to insure that we are all playing by the same sets of rules.
But this case isn't giving Uber Driver regulations, but just taking them to support the competitors who have a bunch of regulations.
Now as I see it, the Government should be doing either the following.
Lessening the regulations on Taxi Companies so they can be more competitive.
Or
Giving Ride Sharing services regulations to insure safety and standards are met to match the Taxi Services.
Or option C) build out their public transportation so taxis and uber weren't needed (as much). That is the reason they regulated taxis in the first place: they gave taxis a monopoly in exchange for acting as an extension to public transit (can't refuse to pick someone up, can't avoid poor neighborhoods, etc..).
You know that taxi services are treated much like an extension of a city's public transit right?
Taxis were given artificial monopolies if, and only if, they agreed to operate under certain rules. For instance, taxis cannot refuse to pick you up just because you live in a poor neighborhood or because you live too far from city center.
The taxi business, for many cities but not all, acts as an extension to public transit, allowing elderly people on the outskirts of town, or people in poorer neighborhoods, some way to get to their doctors appointment, or some way to make it to a job interview.
Uber doesn't want to follow those rules. Their drivers want to hang around the most lucrative spots, usually downtown business areas, and can refuse to come pick someone up if it is too far away.
In a perfect world, cities would build out their public transit better, but cost/time/competing priorities have always been an issue.
I'm curious (and a bit hopeful) to see whether systemd can provide the necessary functionality without extensive custom scripting.
That is what I'm mostly curious about as well. If systemd just makes me re-write all my scripts, but their verbosity doesn't diminish, I'm not sure what I've gained.
Like you, I've got systems with network mounts, database and ldap dependencies, etc.. scripts can help automate a lot of it, but it isn't perfect. I hope systemd can make multi-dependency shutdown/startups easier, and it doesn't turn out to just be a different way of doing things that ends up just as complex.
I've read next to nothing about systemd yet, the answer might already exist.
One nice thing about the VM, like if you use virtualbox, is you can snapshot (backup) the vm before trying updates out. If they break something, you can just rollback to the prior image.
My only lack of understanding in this matter is why so many people aren't capable of understanding more than one Operating system. Laziness?
I am a system analyst. 20+ years of it now. Jack of all trades, programming, hardware, networking, etc..
I just don't want to come home and have to spend another hour or two tinkering with something. I want a toaster at home that plays my games, plays my tv shows, and doesn't mess up for years. I have a mixed environment at home (linux, mac, and and pc), but I'm not beholden to any of them. Whatever works is what I want. When I get the urge to tinker or explore on a computer, I want it to be the fun stuff: learning a new language, playing with a framework, etc.. Fixing your linux/windows box because an upgrade broke the video driver feels like a chore now. It didn't when I was younger and still learning. But by the 100th broken driver...
For the rest of the mainstream average computer users, I agree with Immerman: "efficiency of familiarity". People get used to something at home, at work, and at friends houses, and they tend to stick with what "feels right". No more complex than that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
It is the old 'say something enough times and it becomes true' deal. If people continually stream half-truths, mistruths, and outright lies, it can effectively shift the overton window one direction or another for a group of voters. Truth can work as well, but people using purely factual/logical arguments don't tend to get as much airtime.
So if I wanted to convince people to vote for Trump, I might point out that amnesty for 14 million illegals will bring unemployment to 20% and decrease job security, then ask if there's any other issue that's more important to them than their own job security.
I don't think even that would work in modern politics. People, especially people with low information sets to begin with, feel like everyone is always just making up stats left and right. They are not going to believe any numbers or statements. They instead, are only going to trust someone if they believe that person is in the same "camp" with them ideologically.
Most people cannot evaluate the credibility of a source. All they see is a constant stream of facts or lies, with no way to verify any of it.
Some of the things said by candidates in this election have been so extreme, that if you have a friend that believes those things, it can be extremely telling about their true inner feelings. New information about someone that contradicts your core philosophies isn't a bad reason to end a friendship.
I mean, there comes a time when you can't just keeping making certain subjects taboo to talk about with a friend/relative, in order to sustain the relationship. Things like "no politics at thanksgiving" are OK. But with 'Friend A', 'no politics, no philosophy, no meaning of life, no religion, no foreign policy, etc. '. Sometimes there are just too many "no's".
Some beliefs do deserve to be ridiculed because they are over the top stupid. Other beliefs do deserve to be argued against forcefully because they are detrimental to our society. And some beliefs do deserve to be debated politely, because there are differences of philosophy, and each camp has a valid argument.
Where exactly you draw the line is somewhat subjective. From your description, it sounds like your friend is over the line. But I guess it depends on what he/she is trying to accomplish. Maybe they are at a point where they do not want to keep any friends that belief in certain things they hate.