anchor
stringlengths 100
28k
| negative
stringlengths 105
28k
|
|---|---|
I like more debates of the current status of religion, its place in the world, the actions and commands of various influential religious persons and institutions.
I also like the general debate on the truth or falsity of religions, but to me that is kind of a sideshow. If any religion had any evidence that it was right, then there wouldn't be any credible atheists or persons of other religions. At this point, arguing the truth of any religion is like arguing if vampires sparkle in the sunlight. | Nothing can own a person, not even God.
Obviously.
It amazes me that I have to point this out to people. It really does. Ownership is a human construct, meaning humans have to recognize the legitimacy of ownership for it to be effective. If I cast a spell putting all the money on Earth in my bank account, people will just ignore that and undo the transaction, because they aren't going to just recognize my ownership of the funds via magical possession. I would have to control their minds as well, not just the money. In other words, no one owns anything without the consent of other humans.
Now, humanity, almost unanimously, has decided that no one can own a person. Why? Because it sucks for the person who is "owned". It's not fair and it results in bad things happening, like underutilization of human capital, like reduced happiness, like racism, etc. Great, let's remember those reasons.
Now let's look at God's proposed ownership of humans. Well, all of those reasons are still valid! It still sucks to be owned. You're still going to get misuse of human capital (think about the resources wasted due to God's weird decision to make humans dependent on a metabolism; if we didn't need ATP, or vitamins, or water, there would be orders of magnitude less suffering and people could be far more productive). We'd be happier not owned by a God. Think of the billions of people who have died fearing eternal retribution from their alleged slaved master. That's a preposterous amount of unhappiness caused.
So there's no reason, at all, for humans to recognize God's claim of ownership of humanity. Parents don't own their children. God doesn't get to own us. If God exists, he has the same rights and privileges that any sentient being has, whether it's a human, a dolphin, a chimp, or a God. None of those include the ownership of other sentient beings. Just go down that list and note the trend of countries in proscribing against the ownership of dolphins and chimps, for example. Differing species doesn't justify ownership anymore. SeaWorld will be out of business (or finding some way to make dolphins employees) within 10 years, given these trends.
In any case, my point is what could possibly give God the right own a person? Rights are conferred by consent, you cannot just claim a right. |
I am impressed. You are going to get your day in court, and I think you deserve it. I really hope you stick the jerks with the statutory fees.
Even better though, I think you now have leverage for settlement discussions. This is the time to strike and ask for what you want. The other side is looking at having to try a case against you, which will cost them exponentially more than you are wanting.
Write that demand letter we talked about last time, and good luck! I really am rooting for you. | Ah. That part you may lose on actually. Those facts are bad for your defense, and I may have painted an overly rosy picture without that fact in your post. I would definitely listen to your lawyer's recommendation when you get one.
Also, at least get an estimate of cost from your mom's lawyer. It may be worth it if you can't get legal aid. Good luck. |
You're wrong. I'm not saying women's issues are more important. I'm saying this isn't really a women's issue, but we treat it that way, and it's still marginalized even if people are actively raising awareness.
Bearing that in mind, pretend you are someone outside the scope of the traditional DA victim. If you observe the prototypical victim to which society is 'supposed' to be - or at least encouraged to be - sympathetic being consistently undermined or questioned or blamed, how comfortable are you, the 'outsider' going to feel about exposing your vulnerable position to the rest of society?
Probably not super confident. When we treat DA as men's issues v. women's issues, we framing it as a competitive and zero sum thing. While it's certainly possible that men and women might have unique needs in any situation, including domestic violence, I think the foundational problem in this context is sheer victim blaming. I think a lot of people approaching the issue with an eye towards raising awareness for non-traditional victims (such as men) view their goals as opposed to female DA victims, as though they take away from the awareness pie. Realistically I think it would go a long ways to have a more inclusive approach to DA.
That and the part about how we erroneously frame the social harm in a way that's going to be harder for men to overcome because of typical assumptions about physical strength and constitutional but my phone is dying and I truthfully am not sure how you got that message from my post. | OK, so I am wrestling with all this, because I don't want to be dismissive, and I apologize for reopening this for you after 4 months, but yours seems to be the most comprehensive breakdown of the 'new gender theory' explanation I've seen and you're at least claiming some expertise, and you were foolish enough to say:
>I'd be happy to elaborate my case.
So...
Regarding sex; sex seems to be fairly straightforward; you are sexed male, female or intersex, with intersex being essentially the result of malformation, birth defect, etc and being fairly rare. My question regarding this is; how common does the third category have to be before we start talking third bathrooms/new pronouns/societal reshaping? I mean, I get that male or female doesn't cut it for everyone, but we are not talking a large percentage of the population; somewhere between 1/1500 and 1/2000 births. I assert that it would neither be practical nor desirable to restructure society for these individuals - can you address this?*
Regarding gender; this is a word who's meaning has essentially been fixed as sex for a long, long time - why is it suddenly in play for societal role or what have you?
>People often misconstrue gender and biological sex as synonymous when they are separate constructs
Even your own linked definitions list a connection to sex; they throw the word 'arbitrary' in there but there's nothing arbitrary or unknown about the use of the word in language, amigo. We have to agree on what we're saying if we're going to communicate at all. A man who violates gender normative(utterly subjective in and of itself, I must point out) doesn't change his actual gender no matter how many norms he violates; it is only after reassignment surgery that she is a female by any kind of precise measure...The whole concept of gender fluidity or a-gender seems well, bullshit to me. When you say:
>the fact that it does not make sense to you or fit with your world view does not mean it isn't true for others.
Look, I don't want to come across as a bigot or whatever, but I don't think it's unreasonable of me to say I neither want nor deserve to endure a 20-45 minute conversation about a person's sexual choices or identification *every time* I meet someone who has decided that they don't like a binary divide; I got shit to do! We all, as a society, have shit to do, and this is an intensely personal view of a frankly negligible percentage of humanity, and it seems a colossal, pedantic waste of time. Not because you aren't entitled to your own identity, or your own worldview, but because you are absolutely *not* entitled to arbitrarily change the language to suit your personal politics. I don't call them 'pre-owned cars', I don't say 'rightsizing' and I don't believe in genders other than male or female *because the onus is on those advocating for change to make the case for their existence* and I have seen no evidence to support the entire line of reasoning. I don't care what people present as unless I'm worried about one of us seeking to hook up with the other, which works for orientation as well.
>Wouldn't you want someone to organize that "other" section into categories that were a bit more helpful?
How is this helpful? Also, what are the divisions? I hate to come back to the bathrooms, which seem so inconsequential overall, but hey, when ya gotta go, you gotta go. Where can matter a lot; is it the intent of the movement to abolish sex separation of toilets? If so, does that mean no urinals? Because if so, I'm sorry but that's absolutely fucked. We as a society save a lot of time and effort by having easier to clean, faster to use urinals and relegating those who can use them to longer lines is not a laudable goal, if from no other than a logistics perspective.
If you're going to refute this point, I need you to actually provide some examples of what you'd like to see, and not just banter about how people are snowflakes. Do you want an overhaul of the fashion industry, the elimination of gender-normative clothes? **What is this world you are building?** Right now all I see are people advocating the use of terms which have no real usable meaning like 'gender fluid' - it's nice for you that your identification is not within traditional norms, but if you're selling me a car, coming to my company for a job interview, riding on a bus with me, sharing my sandwich, collecting signatures, whatever, your gender only has any kind of impact on our interaction if we enter a relationship space, so what is it that your faction hopes to accomplish?
*I just want to add that there are absolutely political ramifications to intersexuality and a strong case can be made for, for example, gay marriage using the line of reasoning that someone born with dual or ambiguous genitalia should not be banned from the institution of marriage thereby.
Lastly FYI I've heard 'benegender' as a term for people exploiting the gender movement for their own ends; similar to getting gay married to a friend for insurance benefits. |
>Wait so now you arguing against culpability retributivism.
I'm not "arguing against" anything. I'm trying to get you to *clarify your crowbeggoten position*. You're being entirely too slippery to actually have a conversation with.
>I believe someones guilt and punishment should be decided based entirely on intent.
Imagine a cult that *honestly and sincerely* believes that all children who die before the age of 5 or 6 will be guaranteed paradise, but anyone who lives past that age is bound for hell. No exceptions either way. Out of a profound, honest, and sincere sense of love and duty, they drown all their children on their fifth birthday. Converts whose children are older than the cutoff date bring them up in the doctrines of the cult, teaching them to drown their own children and seek out converts, and they evidently do a good enough job of it that the cult has survived at least a few generations. They know that hell awaits them, as it does all adults, but they do their duty anyway out of a sense of compassion and obligation.
Would you "respect" such beliefs?
Now imagine that, because these people *actually care* about the fates of other peoples' immortal souls, and because they prioritize this compassion higher than lip service to "respect" or "tolerance", they kidnap and drown as many children as they can get away with, to ensure them eternal paradise. As they believe that all earthly experiences are ultimately irrelevant compared to the hereafter, killing a child before the cutoff age is the *best possible thing* you could ever do for them, and letting a child grow up past the cutoff age is the *worst possible thing* you could ever do for them. From these priors, their beliefs are entirely rational, consistent, and sincere.
Would you "tolerate" such beliefs?
>A "true believer" vs a manipulator.
I ask again: How do you tell the difference? | This is absolutely untrue. You're just saying things at this point. You seem to be completely missing the point of this thread, which causes your constant derailment of the issue.
You can make assumptions in a debate so that you can focus on the actual topic rather than irrelevant background information.
<PERSON> *literally* says in the thread description
> I'm not asking who or what created the universe
Because it is irrelevant to what he wants answered. Contrary to your narrow perspective, not every conversation about religion is just a guise to shame theists.
This was a very interesting question that offers insight into the belief system of theists and challenges them to perceive the world in new ways. It is not a debate about whether or not God exits. So stop trying to debate that with people uninterested in engaging. |
It's silly, sure I could turn into some sort of pandeist at will as it would only affect semantics of my world view(I'd just call all that exists god) but that is fairly meaningless and futile. I see no reason to do such a thing, it would just confuse people. So instead I ask, why? | I shit you not, once a giant, like kitten sized dead rat fell in front of me from the sky. I looked around, no high buildings whatsoever in throwing distance(who would do that anyway). I wtf'd for a moment, looked up to the sky thinking maybe a huge eagle or something dropped it but nope, nothing. |
>At this point I feel compelled to ask you why avoiding the guilt of choosing to see a prostitute is worth more than your physical safety or career prospects or health? This is one fucked up value system you have.
Because your virginity stays with you forever, your career is just a thing that you build on top of your virginity and your health doesn't matter. Besides nobody is going to get thrown out of the house for this. | >I wouldn't have really cared if she just said "No, I don't want to,"
The people who won't overreact to a simple rejection are usually the same people who will move on with their lives when they figure out they were rebuffed with a flimsy excuse. The people who *will* overreact to a simple rejection? You *definitely* want to lie to those people. You want to do anything to get them out of your face. It's a self-preservation thing, something so primal it often happens before you have time to consciously process what kind of hole you're digging for your future self. (This is why girls sometimes give their phone numbers to men they never want to see again.)
Unfortunately, it's hard to tell who's going to overreact ahead of time, so if you're a little worried about provoking a reaction you're not currently feeling mentally or socially (or, worst of all, *physically*) equipped to handle, it makes perfect sense to come up with a quick excuse. This has been the go-to method of dodging unwanted invitations for centuries because "no" is a universally disfavored response.
Most people would much rather hear "Sorry, I have to wake up early tomorrow, I should probably get home," than "No, I don't want to watch the game with you." Seriously, try to think of the last time you outright rejected a friendly invitation with the phrase "No, I don't want to." Maybe something close, like "Nah, not really feeling it tonight," but a straight-up "No, I don't want to"? That's not a normal thing to say.
Oh, and if you want girls to tell you the truth, make sure you're leading by example. My least favorite social thing is when a guy asks me out in a way that will probably be interpreted as a date if I say yes and but will retroactively be "just hanging out as friends" if I say no. Yeah, it's a great way for the inviter to neatly avoid romantic rejection, but it's really confusing for the invitee - don't be surprised when someone reacts to that kind of trap by coming up with an excuse for why they can't go instead of rejecting you outright. |
The fact that it's out of charge says to me that it was either lost at your house (and maybe your smallest one found it and put it there) or one of your kids knows where it came from and has been hiding it for a day or two.
If someone broke in and left their phone today, odds are high that it would still have a charge. | Since you're not listening to or believing anyone here who tells you that you will be responsible regardless if you wanted the child or not, and regardless if she actually was or was not on birth control, you should consider talking to a lawyer.
I know you think you're in a bad situation here, but putting your fingers in your ears and refusing to listen to people isn't going to help you at all. These may not be the answers you want, but they're right. |
> Edit: Thank you all for letting the world know that planes have in fact crashed more than once throughout history. No shit, <PERSON>. Its called a joke. Do you think it would be all that funny if the punchline was "Usually, they get destroyed when they crash, but sometimes they go back up in da air."?
Woah, <PERSON> - folks just wanted to point out that a better phrasing might have been ***"Usually only once"***. That's actually more accurate, yet preserved the pacing and timing, and you still get that "sudden shock of recognition" at the end.
*(And none of those pedantic, fedora-wearing hipsters would have had a thing to hang their hats on... ;-)*
| > More specifically, if you are going to define <PERSON> as immaterial, then whatever you are talking about, you aren't talking about what we refer to with the words "<PERSON>" anymore.
<bane voice>Bruce Wayne is material? Show me his body!</voice>
But, seriously; if we define "<PERSON>" to be an immaterial being with dead parents which exists in every possible world, this seems to meet all your objections to [Oceanspray's comment](http://www.reddit.com/r/DebateReligion/comments/zicb9/ontological_argument_questions_responses/c66opwc), while not simply being another word for "the MGB." |
It’s my understanding that women would have babies less often than that. Studies of hunter-gatherers indicate one baby every 4 years or so. Women remain infertile while breastfeeding and women breastfeed for up to 4 years. As the child gets bigger and doesn’t need to be carried much, they breast feed less and so fertility returns and pregnancy ensues, at which point the child will be weaned. | Yes, but don’t you see? This isn’t a <PERSON> situation. The government is not taking from the rich to give to the poor. They are assessing a tax—dues, if you will—to maintain property, infrastructure and make decisions for the common good. That benefits everyone. When poor people on welfare get welfare benefits, they’re not the only ones who benefit. When kids go to public school for free, they’re not the only ones who benefit. You have to zoom out and look at the whole picture. |
Schools are already teaching about family structure and sexuality. It'd be one thing if you said "I should have the right to decide if my kid learns any of it," but by just excluding homosexuality, you're doing the equivalent of saying "I want my kid to learn math, but not that Pythagorean theorem!" | This sounds a lot like [<PERSON>) thoughts on heaven. Basically, if the bible is true, and heaven is without sadness, then god has to turn people into robots that aren't capable of being sad and won't care about their friends and family that aren't with them, in which case, they're no longer the people they once were. |
I have always had this thing where I absolutely HATE reading long texts. I usually slack off, or I keep reading the same thing over and over again. This is also the reason why I don't really enjoy r/WritingPrompts or r/nosleep unless they are REALLY good stories. I also hate reasing books unless they are extremely good. I believe there are only about 5 books (from the 30 or so I read in my life) which I didn't have to force myself to read. This is not only the case for fiction by the way. It is the case for generic information too. This is really bothering me for example when studying, I just can't read the text properly and I learn much better from YouTube videos or real-life explanations. I know I'm not the only one with this problem but I don't know what to do about it and I really want to learn to actually enjoy reading. Is there anything I can do about it? | Well, you just gotta do it. Sometimes you will get to be the most popular comment for no apparent reason, and others you will get downvoted to oblivion (just look at my first comment there, why the fuck am I being downvoted?)
You just gotta learn to not care about it too much.
Alternatively, you can imagine everyone in the room naked. Except that in a room, they are on the interwebz, and probably fapping to some porn. Huh... you know what forget about that last part |
Yep, it seems like just because a song is $1 that it's no big deal if it's stolen. But if 100,000 people steal that song instead paying the one dollar (seriously, it's just one dollar, it's not that much) then that means that the record label is out $100,000, which means they can't pay the artist(s) and studio engineers to record their music which means no music. | Another factor is that instead of playing with toys or outside, the kids only watch tv. And it reduces the amount of time that the child spends with it's family. We didn't have TV's in our rooms when we were kids because my parents said if we wanted to watch TV, we could watch it with the family. |
I would advise you to get friends or family to stay in the house when you're out - don't leave it empty. Change the locks etc in the meantime, but keep someone there at all times til you get a lawyer on this. Make multiple copies of the paperwork, keep originals in an extra safe place. | This is pretty good. Its none of your business what he does with this new chick, but he is still responsible for his treatment of your mutual friend. Hold him accountable for that, and hope this new girl finds out accidentally.
And remember, chances are this new girl is blameless. She's a victim too. Try to be there for her if it all falls apart - it would suck to move twice, lose all your friends and then break up with the one friend you have and be all alone. |
Really? We're gonna keep going with this?
Totally false, he had plenty of time.
At this time, this thread is sixteen hours old, same as the comment asking for examples. Interestingly, OPs first replies (which are also 16 hours old) do not address the comment requesting examples. The earliest sarcastic comment is 12 hours old.
He had four full hours during which he was aware of and ignoring the request for examples before the fun began. Plenty of time to me.
Most embarrassingly, he *still* hasn't obliged the request for a modicum of evidence or example to support these... overstated... accusations.
I think we all have a sense of what he's talking about. Posters here are not worried about stepping on toes. And to paraphrase <PERSON>, people mistake clarity for rudeness. But "harassment"?
If he could link to specific example we would be able to condemn or defend the ostensible belligerents in his experience. But no. Why not? (SPOILER ALERT: he knows he's making a mountain out of a mole hill) | You're misrepresenting the previous poster's argument.
Of course it's the mugger's fault the person got mugged. In a perfect world, that's all that matters, and muggings would never happen.
We do *not* however, live in a perfect world. The world is an ugly place with rapists and muggers and murderers and other assholes living alongside everyone else. Knowing this previous fact, and refusing to take precautions to better secure your own safety is foolish.
In the previous example, nobody is saying that it was the muggee's *fault*, but they are saying that with foreknowledge of the relative safety of the route, he should have taken the safer route. He's not at fault for the mugging, but he still acted foolishly and could have prevented the mugging if he had not done so. |
Those aren’t bad rates, honestly. Car repairs are expensive.
Someone tapped my rear end hard enough that my bumper cover needed to be replaced. That was about $1500 if I remember correctly. It was a minor accident.
She’s already gone through her insurance, just let your insurance know so they can reimburse her insurance. Do not forward her the deductible. She can easily turn around later and say you never did and her company will look to recover that from your insurance company or you (if you’re uninsured). | Except all service animals, in training or trained, should be wearing a vest to signal they’re a service animal. And usually the vest has a part on it in large letters that says “Please don’t pet me”. If they’re not wearing a vest, it becomes questionable if they’re a service animal at all.
My dog is a therapy dog (goes to hospitals etc) but doesn’t wear his vest unless he’s working. He’s a completely different dog with his vest on. |
Would you bet your life on it?
I apologise if the following text comes of as rude. OP I have nothing against you and I would love a reply from you on this,
so please read it :)
Others have already dealt with your view on death,
but what I'm more interested in discussing is the fact that you are holding on a view that is seemingly based on nothing:
"The scientific answer makes no sense to me. The religious (abrahamic religion at least) explanation I also don't like.
I know, it must be **THIS**, which I just came up with"
How does this work for you? Do you often disregard the entire effort of many generations of scientists on a matter
and just hold on to your own belief which you just pull out of your ass? If you are basing your beliefs on death
on some facts, or on an interesting line of logic, I'd love to read it and try to point out how it might be wrong,
but how are we supposed to refute "I think it's that, yeah that sounds nice".
All our knowledge about consciousness points to the fact that it is produced by our very very complex brains
(please point me to any peer reviewed research that disagrees) and our brains are demonstratively **not functioning**
after we die. If the fact that many many people (some times very smart people, even smarter than you) have worked
towards (Sometimes they devoted their entire lives) developing our current understanding of life means **nothing**
to you because you just don't like the conclusion, how are we supposed to convince you?
Do you disagree in the same way about many other topics on which you are no authority? Do think that
Saturn doesn't have planetary rings because the idea sounds silly? Do you strongly believe that matter is composed
of four basic elements (fire air water earth) because you don't like the standard model of physics? Do you
believe that prime numbers are not infinite because that sounds 100% illogical?
I will assume that no, because on these matters you trust other humans in comprehending. But with regards
to life and the brain everyone thinks they **know**. Well you don't, not unless you can build and demonstrate a large
foundation for your opinion. | The logic you apply to end you should also apply to "extent", you say end is better suited as then there is not an end to how annoyed he is. The same stands for extent:
> ex·tent
/ikˈstent/
Noun
The area covered by something: "an enclosure ten acres in extent".
The degree to which something has spread; the size or scale of something.
Synonyms
scope - range - size - degree - measure - stretch
There are no boundaries to how much this pisses him off, sure end is better suited, but welcome to the English language where words and their meanings can be taken many ways.
|
My perspective as a former male forever aloner is to start envisioning the person you want to be with. Imagine them fully. Then reason out what type of person they want to be with and start being that person.
Do this and you will find the person you are looking for. Or they will find you. Try it for a year. :-) | > "as we would be trying to answer this question with our illusioned heads"
This is a good observation and a problem I have been wrestling with for a while.
It's an interesting thought path to follow. There are a couple of ways I get into it. You first need to be aware of the concept of True belief and False belief.
True belief = You believe something is true and objectively it is TRUE.
False belief = You believe something is true and objectively it is FALSE.
False belief could be likened to having an error in your thinking or knowledge. Like a computer that given the problem 2+2 outputs the answer 2+2 = 5
Can you know if you are crazy?
You really have 4 possible options here.
1) Crazy Person : Thinks they are crazy.
2) Crazy Person : Thinks they are not crazy.
3) Sane Person : Thinks they are crazy.
4) Sane person : Thinks they are not crazy.
1) Crazy Person : Thinks they are crazy. (If a crazy person has the judgement to realise they are crazy, are they really crazy?)
2) Crazy Person : Thinks they are not crazy. (If a crazy person thinks they are not crazy then that shows an error in their thinking so arguably they are crazy)
3) Sane Person : Thinks they are crazy. (If a sane person thinks they are crazy then the error in judgement means that they are probably crazy)
4) Sane person : Thinks they are not crazy. (If you are not crazy and think you are not crazy then you are probably not crazy)
So I think the point that this thought raises for me is that if thinking is the method/tool we use to make choices and analyse things then if there is an error in our thinking it will affect the conclusions we draw. If we want to examine our thinking tools we are doing this with the very same tool, thought. So if there is an error in our tools this error would affect the results we get when examining our thinking tool.
Perhaps you could think of it like this. I build a measuring ruler. I want to check that the measuring ruler is accurate. So I make a second measuring ruler. To make sure that the second measuring ruler is correct when I make it I measure it with the first measuring ruler to get the size. Then I measure the first measuring ruler with the second.
Probably not the best explanation or examples but hopefully it gets the point across. After I think about this for a while my head starts to hurt so I give up and browse reddit for mindless memes and gifs.
|
In addition to whiteraven's answer, it's important to realize that rape victims *know* this already. It is basically impossible to grow up as a girl in the United States without hearing that you should never get drunk or wear skimpy clothes or do any of the million other things that people think make you more likely to be raped. The women who choose to get drunk in public are fully aware that they're taking a risk, so your telling them that does not help. | This sounds like someone thought they were in an exclusive relationship with your bf and then learned about you. Based on what you've said and the fact that you haven't heard from this guy in 3 weeks if I were hearing this I would say that I don't think it's more likely than not that he vandalized your car. You can still try to sue him if you wish, but he was mad three weeks ago is hardly proof. |
The problem for Israel is not only the potential of this weapon to be used against Israel, but is afraid of the implications of an middle eastern country obtaining a weapon that will nullify Israel's deterring military power, they just can't accept the reality where Iran, or any middle eastern country is acting against Israel with relative impunity because of MAD.
Iran becoming a regional power, will also mean that the middle east will be a stage for a cold war and an arms race between Iran and the saudi arabia. This situation can easily get out of hand, and Israel doesn't want to get caught in the proxy wars that might spur. | Can you present any arguments why you think fundraising is beneficial to democracy?/ I'm still waiting for an argument as to why you think that the best kind of democracy is one that requires fundraising.
The reason I think the best kind of democracy is one that requires fundraising is because if you have 1,000 candidates to deal with, I'm not sure how they are able to make themselves stand out without doing things like commercials and rallies, both of which require money that you get from fundraising. even if you wanted to do a town hall, you'd have to pay to rent a venue right? so i don't see how all of this gets done without the use of money. now you did talk about money coming from the government if you meet criteria, but meeting that criteria would still involve needing money, which again would require fundraising.
so in order for candidates to stand out from the crowd, they need to raise money to pursue the activities that achieve that.
but like i said, if you're saying that in the best democracy, candidates have enough UBI to spend time gathering enough support that will give them access to government funding, from which at that point, they can begin a real campaign... i can get behind that. |
You know, like and this is totally me speaking introspectively, it doesn't control you anymore. And that's enough. Like people put so much weight on completely cutting yourself off, and denouncing your 'guilty pleasure' - whatever you call it. Sometimes you have to relax! After making it through the semester with my gpa intact, I can have this!
And yes, you also have exquisite taste! | > YOU AREN'T SUPPOSE TO LIVE OFF OF A MINIMUM WAGE JOB
That may be your opinion on this. My opinion is: YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO LIVE OFF A MINIMUM WAGE JOB. how can you pull yourself by your bootstraps, if you're constantly sinking? an education doesn't mean anything due to supply and demand. Just because you made the new norm being college instead of high school doesn't mean they magically get jobs.
It's seriously not that hard, there is only a finite amount of scholarship money to go around and when everybody else takes out a student loan you are creating a bubble where corporations and banks rake in the profits through interest rates and again there's no guarantee they can be paid back. How is that not fucking over the economy? |
> daring to challenge the harmonious multicultural fairy dream world
Judging by this comment, I'm really skeptical you were banned for simply criticizing a nonwestern culture. If you feel that you were, you should probably just work on your phrasing so people don't interpret it as you want to exterminate or remove people of nonwestern cultures from the west. | I'm curious as to what role you perceive anti-semitism as playing in the 1917 revolution. I could give you some sources, but I'm not really sure how you think anti-semitism was a significant factor, so if you could expound on that idea a little, I think I might be able to more useful.
As I see it, the role of anti-semitism was much more prevalent in the 1905 revolution, which was flanked by pogroms, so I'm not sure if you're exploring this line specifically in the 1917 revolution or you mean the 1905 revolution. |
This is obviously my personal opinion, so take it as such. But personally none of those are worth risking a dickhead coming in and basically stealing your house from under you through loopholes.
and as someone else already said... you could move into a perfectly run HOA and all it takes is one asshole to be elected to make your life a living hell.
Not paying 6 figures to own something that can be legally stolen just to live in a neighborhood where everyone's grass is the same length.
Thanks for the reply though. Everyone has different opinions and its always nice to hear differing ones. | Maybe I'm misunderstanding.
I am saying that while a person is alive, they should not (and obviously cannot) be forced to donate an organ. The government shouldnt be able to knock on my door and let me know someone needs one of my kidneys so I have to donate it because I can live just fine off of just 1 kidney, but that other person needs it to live.
But I am also saying that once I die, all bets are off. I dont think people should have the right to refuse organ donation after death. We shouldn't be wasting perfectly good organs when the host body is no longer using them.
Your state sounds like they have an "opt-in" program where people can choose to donate their organs after death. I say, after death it should be mandatory. |
Well then if what you say is true, I guess you are part of the 0.001% of people who legitimately enjoy working an insane amount. Then maybe you should run for office. But most people aren’t like you. Most people would rather start a family, spend time with their kids, and enjoy life instead of working 80+ hours a week. | No. I’m not talking about the average tax burden. I’m talking about the potential personal tax burden for an individual. If the average is going to be 6,300, some people are going to pay way more than that. Everyone is a fan of socialized medicine when they are making less than 75k... but would you still be so in favor of it if you were making 200k or more? |
This is completely irrelevant. No one is arguing that she doesn't have the right to do it. And if your contention is that the right to do something makes it okay to do something, I would refer you to the Westboro Baptist Church.
EDIT: Lol downvotes, really? So am I to assume that people believe that simply because you have the right to do something you can't be an asshole for doing it? Okay... | Because it makes good headlines. Most people are probably blaming the parents on this one. Obviously an 8 year old should neither have access to a gun nor be playing GTA, but mentioning GTA in the headlines causes controversy. It seems to have done pretty well for them thus far... |
> Equal opportunity would be giving a bunch of people the same chance to do a job.
That is how it is right now and in free market system, you get a chance to do your job, but you get paid according to value you produce, i am not sure how throwing money at people give them equal opportunities, if for example person is very dumb, no amount of money can make him smart.
>we are not there yet
It is not a matter of time, but a matter of care and effort on individual level not to extort and enslave fellow man. Non aggression principle is all it takes | >The gist of my argument is, that it was an honest mistake. She was trying to make a joke at the womans expense and send it to her friend over Snapchat, not to accidentally share it to the world.
Differing intent does not excuse differing outcome. What she wanted to do and what she did were different things. If we should excuse everyone because of intent then <PERSON> was a great guy. All he wanted to do was make germany great again.
>Going to jail for 6 months, a $1000 fine, losing her job at her radio show and I can't imagine this being good for her modeling career either. This is all a little much for an honest mistake no?
Well first off the jail time and fine seems incredibly reasonable. Mass dissemination of unlawful nude pictures? Yeah that's not something most people take lightly. Its not surprising the radio station wants to not be involved with her after that, that is kinda crossing a line. And as for her modeling carrier. How do you think other models would feel knowing she might be taking and publishing nude photos of them without their knowledge or permission? Yeah she kinda screwed herself over. |
> then healthcare has been socialized to the extent that there is no longer a free and open market of private insurance
Income transfers aren't socialism, they are welfare. Quite a different thing. And you can still have a private insurance system in a single payer (see: Switzerland, Germany, Finland, others).
Redistribution of money is just that, redistribution of money, and it can be done just fine in a capitalist society.
> Any time the government offers a service to it's people, it removes the capacity for a company to step in and offer that service for a profit.
But if it simply gives you money to find that service yourself, it isn't removing anything from the market.
You can have a remarkably redistribute country with no government owned services.
> A pure capitalistic system would involve the lowest amount of government regulation, ownership or interference of any sort
Ownership? Yes. Regulation and interference in to the operations of the companies has nothing to do with capitalism, though they might hinder the efficiency of the market (but capitalism != the markets).
Hell, in the worst crony CAPITALISMS (and I'll take a very bad case for capitalism here), the government has tons of regulation and interference to support its sponsors and to prevent legitimate competition from arising. That is still capitalism, because the profits flow to private parties. It's a horrible system, but there's no denying it isn't capitalist, which is why being blindly in support of capitalism is obviously folly.
Just because a country is capitalist doesn't mean things work well.
However, you can be pretty sure a country won't work well if it's particularly socialist (profit motive influences less than, say, 50% of the economy).
> which I find a weird argument since you don't seem to think the reverse is true, that unless it employs pure capitalism, it isn't a capitalistic society
I'm saying that a society can offer practically all the goods that people want while being 100% capitalist. You need considerable redistribution, but that isn't against capitalism.
> You are saying that unless a society employs pure socialism, it is a capitalistic society
The capitalism tends to be the fuel to the government operations. So if 60% of the economy creates returns that subsidize the 40% that is socialized, it seems like a socialist edifice standing on a capitalist platform.
Only scenario where I wouldn't call that based on capitalism is if the non-capitalist part doesn't require any support from the capitalist part (IE: 0% taxes on income, capital gains etc). | > These tools are under the control of corrupt governments and individuals for the most part.
Good. Those who care only about themselves are far less likely than idealists to start wars.
> As it stands, people in developing countries have a much lower standard of life and life expectancy than people in the developed world.
That has been the case for centuries, maybe millennia (depending on what you consider "much lower"), although to varying (mostly increasing) degrees, with the overall standard of life tending to improve. While technology has long been the deciding factor in this difference, with advancing globalization, it's mostly politics and its consequences than prevent countries from overcoming poverty (which, of course, doesn't make their situation any better, but perhaps more likely to change).
> automation will become so advanced that only a tiny percentage of the population will have skills valuable enough to command a decent salary or any salary at all.
Don't you think that by the time most jobs are automated, machines will create enough value for an unconditional basic income sufficient for a comfortable life to be feasible?
> There's the global warming and resource issue
With their intelligence, humans are quite adaptable to adverse environments. Sure, global warming will create problems, but a species that has settled some of the harshest enviroments on the planet should be able to overcome them. As for resources: I doubt there have been many cases in history where humankind ran out of a resource; I, for one, can't think of any. Technological progress seems to always have been fast enough to obviate the need for every resource before we used it up, and there's no apparent reason to assume this is going to change any time soon. |
[This](https://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/FAQ_RestPeriods.htm) page from the state's website and [this](https://www.calchamber.com/california-employment-law/Pages/meal-and-rest-breaks.aspx) discussion of a fairly recent court case are relevant.
Now I am not a lawyer, but reading these there *might* be the tiniest bit of grey area in your employer saying you missed your chance.
When this occurs in the future, you should ask your direct supervisor "a delay is going to mean that my rest break is going to conflict with my task of delivering the mail. Would you like me to take my break as scheduled and deliver the mail 10 minutes later, or take my break after I return?" You could also ask this as a more general question now, like "in the future how do you want me to handle when my scheduled rest break directly conflicts with a scheduled task?"
As to the issue at hand, it seems pretty likely that your employer is required to pay you 1 hour of time for each of these occurrences. That first link will point you in the direction of how to report this. Just be aware that employers don't take kindly when employees stand up for their rights by reporting this to the state. And while there are offices and regulations in place stating that employers can't retaliate for reporting them for violations, that doesn't always prevent it from happening. And even when you do have a case, these things still often take time to sort out. And even if they don;t retaliate directly there will likely be some indirect blow-back. It could be little things that make your job a little harder that you can't really prove are retaliation, delayed raises or promotions, subpar performance reviews, etc. Now please don't take this as me saying you shouldn't stand up for your rights; I just want to make sure you understand the possible repercussions before you make a decision/ | If the employee has been released to return to work and they are not fulfilling their duties (whether they are partial or back to full duty), they can still be fired for non-performance, so long as they are at-will (not under contract). You'll want to talk to an employer's work comp. attorney, or at least your insurance or HR rep to help navigate you through this.
As for now, you need to start documenting *everything*. Make record of how and when she is failing to perform her duties. You want to be able to show your reasons for firing her so it doesn't look like retaliation for her workers' comp. claim. |
I'm just saying that atheism isn't exempt from the same scrutiny we'd give any other system of thought that claimed to offer a basis for moral truths--and conversely, any system that makes claims about the nature of the universe in the way atheism does needs to say something about morality. | My point wasn't that changing the minimum wage *changes* how well those workers off the radar are doing; I'm saying that no wage regulation will help any of those people without enforcement--except part of the reason governments prefer setting minimum wage laws to providing antipoverty programs is that they don't have to do anything if they change the minimum wage; enforcing a minimum wage law takes away that advantage from the government's perspective. |
>Not sure how you got that idea.
Because you gave me a cutoff. You said "being bred into existence to be used as a product is a pretty clear line."
That answer means that you believe there's a cutoff between "life worth living and life not worth living for animals that are being eaten."
If you didn't want me to think that, you should have answered differently. Is that the case? Or is there some other confusion with the question (the 'cutoff')? | >All I have done is used what humans know to be true about the universal reality we all share (physics, etc) to understand that any god would by definition violate some known, experimentally established natural law. (For instance: thermodynamics prohibits omnipotence. Period.)
But a god (or at least one could conceive of a concept of a god that would) exist outside of the laws of physics. A creator god would have created these laws, of course, don't you think they could at least not necessarily apply to that god? |
...ohmygod, I need these. I love Legend of Zelda. That mirror is GORGEOUS. And so classy! I love it when you can properly integrate fandoms with adult class.
I really, REALLY want that mirror.
That's freakin amazing.
And the mug.
damn.
There's no chance you're opening an etsy shop or something, is there? | yeah man, I know. mom suicided last year, a month before mother's day. I hadn't talked to her in a month. this month's being rough.
it is scary, and funny in a twisted way, that humans are so fragile. you place all your dreams, all of your love in someone, and suddenly, she is no more than a hollow husk, a cold, dead shell that only vaguely resembles your mother. a moment of madness, and all your life crumbles. now I have a little brother, that says he will kill himself to meet mom, and nothing else to care for. in the end, we are nothing.
like <PERSON> said: "and the worm, this servant of ruin, stalks my eyes to eat, and will leave only my hair, in the inorganic coldness of dirt."
but that does not matter, does it? what we do with the time we have with the ones we love is what matters. she lived 40 years, and was a beautiful, funny, intelligent woman that took care of everyone she knew. and being her son is worth every single droplet of the excruciating suffering I feel everyday now. |
> Fine, i'll concede that sometimes a company will have a 'short window of advantage'.
I disagree that it's a "short window", it's a significant window.
> What about the rest of my examples then?
Hmm let's see:
> Do you think anyone would make computer games anymore?
Of course, piracy hasn't stopped game companies yet and there's virtually no chance of being caught right now. In fact, we'd probably see more games being developed and more derivative properties.
Hell, there was a fan-made sequel to Chrono Trigger that would have been made if Square-Enix hadn't shut them down due to copyright and the game was shaping up to be pretty damn good. Instead of tons of rehashing the same properties over and over, we'd probably see much more innovation in games as companies would be competing to make new and innovative stories/characters. Remember that game mechanics are not copyrightable nor patentable so the only thing that Copyright does in videogames right is prevent derivative works and ostensibly make piracy illegal. Piracy hasn't killed the game industry (and it won't) so the only thing that copyright is doing right now is making derivative works illegal, which I say is a bad thing.
> music?
The vast library of Creative Commons music that musicians give away for free and make money off live performances, merchandising, etc. would show that if you're good and people want to listen to you, then it's easier to make money without copyright because it's easier for your music to spread and for new people to hear you. People made music before copyright and in fact most of our most famous "classical music" was created before music could be copyrighted. We haven't seen music last as long as classics since music could be copyrighted, and I'd say that copyright is the cause of the lack of longetivity of music.
> You think people would ever pay for movies?
Wherever netflix goes, piracy radically declines. So yes, people pay for movies all the time. People still go to the movie theater instead of just downloading the movies.
> No one would ever do any research, there's be no further in advancement in anything
So there was no research of anything at all until copyright existed? Give me a break that's ridiculous. I'd argue that we'd see *more* advancement as competition would force people to do more research to get out the latest and greatest before their competitors to get the first to market advantage and companies and people wouldn't be able to just invent one big thing and live off it for the rest of their lives, but would instead have to continue inventing and continue researching to maintain their status and livelihood.
Increased competition would be better for research and advancement.
How's that? | > The scientific method is rooted in experimentation and observation.
Correct.
> Descriptive laws of nature are then formulated on this basis
Yes, the "laws" of nature are just what we call patterns that we observe, such as U x I = P in electric systems.
> and are extended to apply to the whole universe and throughout all of time
Kind of, yeah, but theoretically the laws of physics could change. We've never observed that to happen, however.
> i.e. the scientific method is always based on induction and extrapolation.
I guess you could say that.
> If God does not exist, then the universe must have occurred randomly
Define randomly, please. Others have already tackled this part of your argument, so I'll move on:
> and as such there is no reason to expect there to be any such uniformity
That we shouldn't expect there to be uniformity, doesn't mean that a "randomly" created universe cannot be uniform in nature.
> and hence to assume so is logically unjustifiable.
No, because we can see that our universe IS uniform, and we have no evidence that God exists; thus it follows that our universe is uniform, but was not necessarily created; you're rehashing the old "But there's order, so it must be designed!", with a splash of improbability argument.
Is it impossible for an ordered universe to have come into being "randomly"? The answer is a clear no, and thus it is logically justifiable that that could have happened.
> If God exists then it is perfectly plausible that He would create a universe that exhibits such uniformity, in which case the scientific method is logically justified.
This may be true, but it does not prove that uniformity could not form on its own.
> Hence the scientific method is only logically justified if God exists.
Nope. You argument hinges on the fact that a "uniform" universe CANNOT have come into existence without the interference of a deity.
Prove that, and you might have a leg to stand on. |
So I can't vote for <PERSON> because he's a republican, but then I also couldn't vote for <PERSON> because of anti gay marriage and racism then? You can't just count people out for single things if you have a lot of them, you'll have no one left to even vote for. | I just genuinely enjoy most of the songs on my phone I start to delete them. I have that much music because I have stuff like the entire homestuck soundtrack, and on top of that a lot of artists I enjoy. Right now I'm going through some videogame soundtracks I downloaded from humble bundle to put more music on it. It's not all going to sync though, because I only have about 12Gb of space on that phone, which is a really obscure number for data storage. |
> Where exactly did I say I was okay with violence? You don't seriously think I literally meant that I was going to physically drag someone into a tax office and wrench the wallet from their hands, did you?
*In fairness, we can't even get everyone on board to pay taxes willingly right now. Frankly, I don't really care if they're willing. It's something, I believe, we need as a society. So if that means dragging people kicking and screaming into it... I'm perfectly okay with that.*
I literally do believe you are okay with that because that's exactly what taxation is. Since your world view requires everyone to participate regardless of personal feelings on the matter that means you make the population submissive under the threat of violence.
To me idea's that require violence to enforce them aren't idea's worth having.
But lets put your money where your mouth is, if you really believe in this that strongly get off the keyboard and donate your time or money raising money for charities that provide health care to those less fortunate . | > If a construction worker kills someone it isn't up to other construction workers to bring them in, it's the government's job. Same rule applies here. Why do we let them self police, why are they exempt? It's a dangerous ideology to follow and it puts them above the law and the average citizen. Also, ever heard of the police's "Blue code of silence"? Same could happen here, but to a far greater degree.
Simply put, because the police *can't* police them because they do not have the ability to do so without powers. Who polices the police? Well, other police! The same is true for Superheros. The point is that unlike a construction worker killing someone, the government simply doesn't have the capability to take down the superheros effectively. We already see other superheros policing each other, so that seems to be the most efficient and effective way to do it. It's not perfect as you point out, but the alternative proposed is worse.
> It gives the government the knowledge to protect its citizens. If one day a superhero starts robbing banks or killing people, the government could put a stop to them.
And how would the government stop them any more than they could stop a supervillain? The government would be relying on *other superheros* to step in and stop them just as they rely on the superheros to stop the supervillains. And even giving government the knowledge of identities (which in most cases the intelligence agencies already have or know how to get), is that worth putting innocent people at risk? If a supervillain knows precisely who their arch-nemesis hero is by stealing the information from the government, the villain will just kill off the hero and their family and be done with it. That secret identity is all that keeps them safe and similarly all that keeps the super villains from winning.
> No one has tried to kill (SPOILER ALERT) <PERSON>'s family.
Because <PERSON>'s family is a secret known only to <PERSON>, <PERSON>, and <PERSON> himself (before the events of the movie). No one has tried to kill them **because no one knows they exist**.
> Ignoring the fact that it wouldn't be public knowledge and would be a government secret, why do you predict this "Fall of superheroes"?
Well, after <PERSON> revealed his identity, Aunt <PERSON> was shot and killed. In fact, revealing his identity did so much damage to <PERSON> and his ability to be a hero that he struck a deal with <PERSON> (the Marvel Universe Devil) to make his identity a secret again giving up his marriage to <PERSON>. There are tons of examples over and over again in the comics of the family and friends of heros being killed or put into danger by the simple fact of their identities being known. You're assuming that just because it would be a "government secret" that supervillains could never get their hands on the info, but this is a ridiculous assumption. Supervillains get government secrets *all the damn time* and as a you'd find the identities being auctioned off to the highest bidders.
Not to mention that the list would be potentially used by the government for oppressive reasons such as discriminating against mutants. (Which we've also seen happen again and again). |
I upvote interesting things, clever things, things that make me think, funny things. Similar with comments.
I rarely dowvote. I will downvote for crap posting in a sub with something. Like, in the snake subreddit I want to see snakes. I like snakes and I find them interesting. Occasionally people post things the same shape as a snake. Like a spring. Then say, curly metal snake wants a bouncy boop. Fuck you, that's not a snake that's a fucking spring.
I rarely dowvote comments unless they are being incredibly obnoxious or offensive enough to stand out from the usual crap. | Cleaned bathrooms for 7 years.
Women's restrooms were *usually* worse.
As best as I can tell the main two factors involved are assholes and children, which is why women's bathrooms are generally worse.
In a men's bathroom, you have your "accidental" messes, trivial stuff that isn't too bad. Dropping paper on the floor, little sprinkles of piss on the toilet. Sometimes an asshole will decide to piss on random things. Sometimes there's graffiti and sometimes a drunk person vomits somewhere, as long as it isn't the sink it isn't too bad.
In women's bathrooms, you still have your accidents, and you still have your assholes, but you also have the small children variable, because you often see mothers taking very small children into the bathroom.
I am going to go ahead and pray that the children are the source of shit being wiped, by hand, onto the walls and that it wasn't some asshole grown woman, because that is disgusting. Either way, that happens. Rarely happens in the men's room.
Also, more "accidents" happen, and I can only assume it's because of women who have acrylic nails. I don't know why else there would be tons of tiny little shreds of toilet paper everywhere, but it was there every day, so I always just assumed that it was really hard to grab toilet paper if you had those acrylic nails. Never saw that in the men's room.
You still got your occasional drunken puke, and you also occasionally had blood which was pretty awful. Not because period blood is gross but because cleaning up *any* blood is fucking gross.
Problem is, the bathrooms have different thresholds for "dirty."
What I mean is this:
When you walk into a bathroom, if it is dirty enough, you will cease to try to clean up after yourself. The "broken window" theory, or basically "if it's already this fucked up, why not make it worse?"
If it's already "dirty" and you drop something, you simply aren't going to pick it up. Even if you normally would.
In a men's room, unless there's body fluids on something, guys are generally willing to be pretty lenient about the "dirty" threshold. It's really only once you get piss on some surface that guys stop trying to maintain cleanliness and it spirals out of control into disorder.
Women, though, women seem to much more easily classify the room as "dirty" and I realized after years it has to do with the sink. For men, the threshold is piss on a surface, but for women, it's about personal cleanliness. If the sink is clean, if there is *some* recourse for a woman to feel like she can be clean after she does what she does, she will maintain order. As soon as she questions that, all bets are off.
When I realized I could keep the women's room 10x cleaner just by cleaning off the sink every few hours, I felt like a God. Pick up a soggy paper towel, wipe it down with some bleach, and all of sudden, instead of coming in at 11pm to find a horrible mess, I found a bunch of tiny shredded strips of TP and that was basically it.
Still, no question. Women's bathrooms are more disgusting as a general rule of thumb, but never underestimate the potential for an asshole to throw things into disarray.
Edit: Thank you, to whoever gave me gold. :) |
Well, I strongly disagree. But I can't prove you wrong.
I would ask you to think about whether such a brutal punishment is fair for such a minor crime.
What would you ask me to think about, to begin to change my mind? | Sure. Or whatever you have to do afterwards.
Look, I don't have gold. I don't care about gold. I'm not trying to convince you that you should get gold, or that it's worth the money.
I was just saying that it's not literally just a subreddit. |
So you're saying you reject that there are differences between men and women? Look in nature. Men and women animals of the same species have different roles. I'm not saying we should have gender roles, I'm just suggesting that the same thing that drives those roles in other animals drives our human interests. | > You're just still confused on what rights people have.
No I'm not. All I'm saying is that me being offensive isn't infringing on anyone else's rights. Them telling me to stop being offensive does infringe on my rights. I'm not saying g they can't be offended, I'm not saying they can't make it known they've been offended. What I'm saying is they shouldn't expect their being offended to make any difference to anyone else. What is so hard to understand about this? |
The emotions can be overwhelming, however much your logical self knows that people aren't, for example, breathing noisily just to annoy you. You still have a whole lot of rage to deal with, somehow. The rage is very real, even if the things that set it off are trivial or don't even exist.
If you've ever been in a solemn situation and had the overwhelming urge to giggle, then that clash between what you're feeling and what's going on is similar. | Haha, I've wondered that.
It's probably in part why I don't discredit them, I don't see any reason why it couldn't have been any of them.
The way it worked out, Christianity is directly involved in the resolution of some of the more unpleasant situations I was in, so since I felt gratitude to not being in those situations any long, I paid tribute in faith. I've always wondered if it could have been any religion, though. If maybe some sort of Hindu organization had interfered with my gradual destruction, would I have adopted that religion? I couldn't say. I just try to be grateful. |
> Ever try to talk to a bitchy girl that doesnt want to talk to you at a bar? Yeah that shit happens in the real world too
And doesn't that make you mad? Do you think "bitchy" girls should get away with that? I'm guessing the answer is no - you would call them a bitch (internally or out loud) and feel rejected. In this case, you are the bitchy girl who's not having any of the guy's shit, you're the bitch who doesn't want whatever some guy is offering. | > but are those types of test questions in the norm or are they the exception?
Then doesn't that change your statement from "grades are not a good indicator" to "most tests as we have them are a poor metric for testing intelligence"? In other words, grades would be fine if the tests were better? |
> By using the word implication, you prove that I explicitly said no such thing as me not being anti-gay.
Okay, let's be honest; would someone who believes they are anti-gay be this offended by an assumption that they are anti-gay?
> If the OP wanted a genuine discussion on this, they would avoid using charged terms like anti-gay when discussing anti-gay-marriage proponents.
I can see your point, but I don't necessarily agree with it. Anti-gay isn't a defamatory term, it's a literal and accurate description. Yes, it does carry some baggage due to the same word being used to describe the more extreme views as well. However, if we pick a new word to use it will eventually have that same baggage. Do we call those of a smaller statue dwarfs, midgets, or little people? Retarded replaced idiot, and is accurate for developmentally disabled; that is until it became a way to insult people. Now we insult people using "mentally challenged". It's a moving target. Autism is a spectrum, but those with aspergers were uncomfortable with the association of those on the other end that the DSM redefined Autism.
My point is that no matter what term we use to describe those against gay marriage, it's also going to be associated with those who are more extreme. If I opposed interracial marriage, you would be right to call me racist. That doesn't mean I burn crosses on lawns or lynch people, but that still puts me in a place where I think darker skin means less equal. Insisting on political correctness is a pointless endeavor.
> I would claim that the OP was off topic....
The OP *set the topic* as asking Christians opposing gay marriage to defend their position. Your topic is whether or not anti-gay is an accurate term for that position, and whether or not OP assumed all Christians were anti-gay.
I did not redefine the topic. Gay marriage includes all of those social issues. The fight isn't over the word "marriage", it's that homosexuals want access to a legal status that confers all of those rights and privileges. It is silly to create a law identical to heterosexual marriage just to avoid the use of a term, so the battle is to take the easy path of just including them into existing law.
> This is false. It views homosexual acts as an abomination, not homosexuality
This is another example of your pedantry that I am arguing against. Homosexuality is descriptive of certain behaviors, and behaviors are collections of acts. I get that you can be right with God if you are gay and stay in the closet. The result of this idea is that if a person acted on their fundamental desire for love, affection, and companionship; they become are an abomination. I hope you don't believe that homosexuality is a choice. If Christians had their way, they would condemn homosexuals to live their life without that deep emotional connection.
> This means that gays sin, I sin, everybody sins.
I honestly respect that position. It my be surprising, but I am a straight man happily married to a straight woman. It makes me cringe to see two guys being affectionate;. However, I also have similar reactions to straight couples I find very unattractive. That reaction comes from empathy (I'll explain). When I imagine myself in the position of that person, it's disgusting to me. It's easy to confuse "I am disgusted" with "this is inherently disgusting". The abomination word attached to it gives credibility to that confusion.
The big problem I have with the anti-gay-marriage crowd is that they are trying to legislate sin. Sin is between you and God. It is not our place to try and control or prevent sin. Christians can have holy matrimony despite gays having a legal status. My marriage is unaffected by the relationships of others. I think we can both agree that men should not be blindfolded, and women should not be covered/hidden to prevent lustful thoughts and behavior. Laws cannot (and should not) prevent lust or homosexuality. A redefinition of who gets marital rights does not affect holy matrimony in the eyes of God. The question is why you are so concerned with the sins of others, while not pushing laws to prevent sins of your own. It's easy to support laws that do not affect you. If Christians really wanted to defend Christian marriage, adultery would be illegal. Would <PERSON> support such hypocrisy?
| At this point, I don't even know if this should be a reply to you; I'm trying to figure out this hypothetical person OP is arguing against.
They believe marriage is about having and raising kids, and that is their only argument against gay marriage. Presumably, they otherwise have no problem with gay people; if they did, they wouldn't need this argument.
In this comment chain, they also believe that a child should be raised by a man and a woman.
The only way I can see these two beliefs being consistent is if they believe that men (should) always act a certain way and women (should) always act a certain way, and only by combining these two roles should you raise a child.
OP now argues that such a person cannot reasonably believe that a child is better off being raised by one parent than two homosexual parents. I'd say that this is a bad argument, and it's possible to believe that two fathers could have a more detrimental effect than lacking a mother.
I doubt there's any person who actually fits these beliefs. I feel like this CMV would have been better stated as "People sometimes say they are against gay marriage because marriage is about children, but they just don't like gay people". |
Hey there!
In my past life, I used to run 3 miles in 22 minutes. I was like you when I started out, I could only run about half a mile before I felt like I was dying. Then I started running for hours each day, only stopping to walk when I felt like dying, after I felt better I continued to run. After about 2 months of doing that every single day, I could run two miles without stopping. About 5 months later of running for hours every single day, I could run 3 miles in 25 mins.
That's what worked for me, it could work for you, but just make sure you stretch and drink a lot of water all the time. <PERSON> used to say, "if you're not pissing every 30 mins, you are dehydrated." | The best birthday ever was in the good ole year of 1997, I was turning 8 that year. My birthday gift was none other than the greatest video game console on the face of the Earth, the Nintendo 64. I was so excited, but that isn't what made it the best birthday ever. The weekend of my party all my cousins came over to celebrate. I was sad at the end of the day when they all left. About 10 minutes later the door bell rang. My cousins had tricked me! They all came back in their pajamas and we had a huge sleepover.
It's been downhill ever since lol |
>Well I think any belief, hunch, or expectation *you* or anyone else may have about consciousness is also not demonstrable at this time.
Yeah, but you are going out of your way to hold a belief that isn't justified.
>That your beliefs are somehow more grounded in scientific rigor than mine?
I would say so, since you hold an unjustified view that I do not.
>I mean, if you're not going to address the thought experiments I gave about the supra-consciousness that arises from a bizarre functionally isomorphic system to the brain then I don't see how your critique of my opinions carries weight when you're not following the logical endgame of what the theory you're proposing predicts.
I do not see the relevance of this. But sure, I'll address it. Its a very strange criticism though.
If you put a bunch of cars together in one spot, does that mean you have a super car? No. Same thing here.
It could be that people communicating does not form a super consciousness.
But lets say it does. Okay, so what?
>I think it's incredibly reasonable to expect consciousness to be a physical dynamical process rather than a computational artifact.
Maybe we shouldn't hold that view util its demonstrated.
>Well, a machine is a very very abstract concept. A collection of levers and hydraulic systems can in principle implement the information processing of a brain. Would that collection of levers be conscious?
I don't see why not.
>You need to think about the most absurd predictions that functionalism makes in order accept it.
hmm? what absurd predictions?
>As I noted it may not be a particle but the way in which particles interact. And how is it not reasonable to expect there is probably a completely new physical phenomenon that we need to discover in order to explain it.
Because the time to believe that to be the case is when its demonstrated. | >The Catholic definition of good is <PERSON>
You are missing something. If good is god and god is good, then why do good? You need to make a case that:
A) There is some inherent magical oughtness attached to doing good/god
or
B) Humans objectively tend to intrinsically seek good/god either way.
Though I must warn you, option B is coming dreadfully close to being a falsifiable hypothesis.
>How would one define harm without some outside morality?
How do you define harm even with an outside morality? Even if god writes the answer key to the morality quiz there's still no way to say that you should try to get as many points as possible.
>Suffering and death are not evil. They are intrinsic components of this world. They can be made evil by our darkened minds, weakened wills, and rebellious bodies, but they are not, by their nature, evil.
This is probably the biggest qualm I have with Catholics right here. It is a difference of basic moral assumptions on the basest moral level.
>It would be impossible for us to truly love God back if we lacked free will. A robot would not have free will, could not love, and could not be the object of true love.
Your definition of true love requires free will. This appears to be arbitrary. |
There are always exceptions and outliers. People do sometimes commit heinous acts knowing fully well that they will be caught and punished. Sometimes they feel it is worth it, because for them, death or a lifetime in jail is the worst punishment they can get.
If it's God whose doing the punishing... well... there are far worse things than death. | Look at your girlfriend. Now look at your mom. Now back to your girlfriend. Notice a difference... one, expects you to be incompetent and needing help to figure out basic everyday living. The other can legally have sex with you, but only if she has reason to believe you are an adult. |
>Given there is no God, what would be the meaning of love?
Love can be seen as a sort of significance. If you love someone, they are significant to you. From such a viewpoint, asking what the "meaning of love" is, is sort of a meaningless question, when love is, itself, meaning. | >God knows how and when you are going to die.
I would object to this part. God does not **know** when and how I am going to die. The reason for that is parts of it are up to me, (how I eat, if I exercise) and are yet to be determined. |
They had to lay out some costs to setup your account that they amortize over the life of your contract. They have to perform work to move you as well.
You could try to negotiate a lower cancellation fee, but their willingness to deal would be based on how long you were a customer of theirs before you moved. If it was only a few months, they will be out a lot of money (the $1,000 may not even cover it).
I'm surprised they would have let you out of your contract if they couldn't provide service, they have no control over you moving offices. That is not the norm. | In reality, there is never really a good time have a child. There are always good reasons not to. Work, finances, home life, time, etc. etc. Having a kid causes people to mature due to the sacrifices that it requires. It's a special kind of maturity that changes a person, hardens them.
You said you guys aren't trying to have a kid, but aren't preventing it either. If you are having unprotected sex, then you are trying to have a kid. This was a conscious decision that should not be carefully stepped around.
I don't know your wife, or anything other than what you have said here, but it sounds like even without a pregnancy she should continue to see a therapist. You should work with her to keep her going. Considering everything else, this will be your choice, but you should finalize your decision 100% before moving forward. Otherwise there could be a lot of regret in the future, one way or the other. So how do you do this? The best way that is to pray or mediate on this question until you come to an answer. If you are a religious person, sincerely pray about this question. If you are not a religious person, then spend some serious time in meditation on this question. Set a timer on your phone and, no matter what happens, don't stop meditating until the timer has gone off. Do this as many times as you need until you are 100% certain with the path forward.
It is critical that you get to that 100% point, as this is a very important question.
Best of luck to you and feel free to post follow-up questions, etc. and I will do my best to answer them. |
Art is already immediately stolen. Abolishing or limiting copyright terms will not create a thieving society because we're already in it. Individuals and corporations are tasked with monitoring the world, finding infringements, and seeking damages - a monumental effort that takes resources and energy away from making more stuff.
Art is a product, but once it's out there, you can't presume to control how that product is received and shared. Digital copying and distribution leaves no trace, so it's in the best interest of the artist to make their work widely and easily available. If they put it behind a paywall some people aren't willing to pay for or make hard to find, someone else *will* come along and fill that need regardless of laws currently in place. You can't treat your digital product like a physical product. Making a profit isn't the incentive, art will get made either way, profit is the means to make more art.
I would also argue against the very harmful statement. As your work is "stolen", it's also marketed and distributed for you. A larger audience is aware of your work and you can leverage that. As a little guy in a big pond, it forces me to engage my audience, branch out merchandise that they want, and create not just for profit, but for them.
I never bought more albums or went to more concerts then in the days of Napster, because I was paying attention to the music scene. Today, we barely even buy albums, we play their youtube videos or stream their content. Musical acts make their money at concerts, the album and their brand is the marketing that gets you there. Game of Thrones is the most widely pirated show ever, yet it's popularity has fueled HBO subscriptions across platforms and around the world to staggering heights. People pirating quality content are sometimes swayed to buy in when distribution is easy and affordable, those that don't would never have seen your work anyway and likely would never have bought it. | There's not a lot of call in today's economy for men who can break big rocks into little rocks with a sledgehammer. Almost all manual work has been automated.
If you want them doing agricultural work, most of that involves driving a tractor around. There's still some crops that are harvested by hand, but it's a dying trade and the security implications are severe. The few dollars per hour of value you're generating are not going to offset the vast number of guards it would take to prevent prisoners from escaping.
Factory work is all the worse. You can't have prisoners handling tools that could be used as weapons, which is most, or operating complex machinery that requires a lot of training. They also mustn't be put in a position where, by accident or malice, they could do a lot of damage. That's pretty well any position in any factory. Call up a local plant and ask to visit: they'll say no, because you're not trained in that production facility and you could easily hurt yourself or break something and lose them a lot of revenue.
Other manual labor is in areas like construction and maintenance, which come with the need for training, the escape risk, the tools as weapons, and the chance of wrecking something, all rolled in together.
All in all, any manual work you could get prisoners doing would generate extremely little value, while requiring extra effort by relatively high-paid guards and administrators. It's a net loss.
The days of the Shawshank Redemption are long gone. |
Ah, perfect! So yo admit that you really have no other evidence of the effectiveness of prayer then? Aside from prayer making people happy, do you have anything else? I mean, I'm still waiting for evidence for these other types of prayer you asked about.
If you think all prayer needs to be proven to be ineffective before you tell people that asking a magical am daddy for things doesn't work, the.pn you're an idiot.
Do you also believe unicorns and fairies might exist because it hasn't been proven that they don't? Do you believe that batman is real because it hasn't been proven that he isn't?
Your logic is shit. Stop focusing on the one type of prayer and give some evidence for others, or shut the fuck up. | From your replies I'm gathering that you don't want schools to preach Christianity so much as educate pupils about various religions.
For what it's worth, that's exactly what every single person in my country has to do until the age of sixteen. I also found it quite helpful in that I can hold a discussion about most major religions and not look completely ignorant.
But, you seem to want to place a lot of emphasis on religious education and that is where I disagree with you. You say you don't want it to be only about Christianity and it needs to be all religions, but do you have any idea how broad that subject is? How much time would be appropriate to devote to it? An hour a day? Two hours? We have children who still struggle to read, write, speak a foreign language, do maths and think logically. Which core subjects would you cut back on to add to religious education? Employers look at your maths and English scores, foreign languages are a huge asset when applying for jobs. Universities here will look at your GCSE scores for maths and English; they won't even bother to check RE results unless that's going to be your degree. For my English degree, they wanted an A in Maths, English Language and English Lit with at least a B in a foreign language at GCSE. Religious education is just not as practical to teach to children who need other skills to give them a better chance of succeeding.
So while I agree that covering the basic principles of major religions is good for students as it encourages diversity, critical thinking and new ideas, I think it's a subject that only really matters to the religious. Therefore, as public schools are not religious (parents who wish for their child to be more educated about their own religion can send them to a school for just that) it would be very detrimental to the students to spend excessive time teaching them about something that is mildly interesting and useful in some ways, but ultimately not going to get them a career in future. |
I don't deny that it's a useful piece of literature. My argument is that it is not a very good piece to base one's moralities on. The lead character, whose image we are supposedly created in, frequently sets a bad example. Yes, we can still learn from it about human nature and human societies from that time.
And to the extent people believe much of the supernatural stuff actually took place (you are a minority in this camp), we are raising new generations of children who are forced to accept bullshit from authority before having the skills to question and refute it. That alone is a terrible lesson for those kids. | I would like to know what this other option is like as well.
I just think it's hard for the religious in the western world to swallow the word secularism - it carries particular "ungodly" connotations to them. Unfortunately, when deciding law, there are only two ways to do it. You can use your personal preferences, beliefs and biases (non-secular), or you can collaborate with others, finding common ground in what everyone can agree is true (empiricism, secularism).
If there is any gap in my understanding about this, I certainly would love to hear it so I can be more correct in the future. What do you think? |
>Even if he was specifically told that his music was likely to cause a seizure?
No, he is still not negligent. The chiropractor had a right to be there and to play the music that he was trying to sell so that other patrons could hear it. The fact that your friend has an extremely rare disorder doesn't mean that he had to stop playing it.
There is also an argument that your friend assumed the risk by staying where she could hear the music, instead of immediately leaving and asking the conference organizers to move her booth.
What happened to your friend is unfortunate, but I don't think she has any legal remedies. | >Dr. <PERSON> and <PERSON> would say yes, we were doing harm.
I wasn't disputing harm. I accepted that they were doing harm. I was disputing whether it was bad, which it was by your definition.
>all I'd have to do to qualify my statement into a more universal statement would be to acknowledge a potential excuse on account of defending one's self or another.
That is the excuse that I am affirmatively making. Being the third party is only bad all the time if you have an obligation to hurt yourself to protect someone else from harm.
>I'm guessing you're not actually trying to equate adultery with war, or the Allies with the "other (wo)man" or the Axis with the cuckolded partner.
I'm not actually trying to do that, no. I'm directly disputing your definition of bad as not universal. |
That's the problem. I do those things now on behalf of the company I work at. If I decided to branch off and do it myself, word would get around quickly. I don't suppose the owner would take too kindly to me taking potential company business away for personal gains. | I am not against all inefficiencies. However, I'll admit that I'm not educated enough in the events you stated to state an opinion. Believe it or not, I'm all for freedom of choice when it comes to eating. I would just like people to be making an educated decision on what they eat, rather than just keep eating what they've always ate. If you choose to do nothing because you see no issue, that's fine, that's your choice. |
When you're trying to use wordplay to trap someone into believing something untrue that IS intellectually dishonest.
"Well you have to believe what I say because I just knocked down all the pillars of your reasoning!"
The reality is if someone is convinced by the type of argument you just made its because both of you dont understand biological sex well to begin with. | I think its pretty obvious you're not thinking clearly and are just trying to insult me.
Children cannot consent. In fantasy, out of fantasy. It is an innate quality of children when it comes to sexual activity.
If you have a fantasy about drinking water but the water is gaseous it stops being a fantasy about water.
Just like when you're fantasizing about sex and the sex is with a minor it stops being a fantasy about consensual sex and starts being a fantasy about rape. |
<PERSON> says a lot of inflammatory things without backing them up but I'm determined to see other viewpoints. He seems to be making this one in support of a free market with no government intervention. American colonies grew and were so successful because government was somewhat representative, small, and there were no taxes.
edit: clarity | Glad I could help! I wish I could find the original post. It was probably articulated much better than I could. My explanation was pretty shallow and really only focuses on what the term was designed to mean. The word has a lot of political and ideological baggage that changes the meanings a bit.
Also, just thought of a dad joke to say if anyone tells you to check your privilege.
"I tried but it bounced!" |
I actually don't think it is a defense. I'm pretty sure statutory rape is a strict liability crime. This means that even if you were not negligent and even if you reasonably believed she was over age, you are still guilty.
If she showed you a fake ID you however the prosecutor may decline to prosecute, you might get a lesser sentence, or the jury could say screw the law we aren't convicting.
Strict liability in my opinion applies too often. I don't see why it should exist for cases like this. It really should be reserved for a narrow set of situations such as unusually dangerous activities. | It's not a saying it's a highly valid legal argument.
My argument against lying is that it can cause a suspect to incriminate themselves unfairly in response to a lie. Example: they tell you they saw you take the wallet, and if you don't confess they can have you locked up in a month, but if you confess and give $200 back then you are free to go. So, you confess to something you didn't do to pay and get away. However it was a lie, had you not confessed they had to let you go this same day and now you will spend a year in jail. This is unfair coaxing of people. |
If you're against them all, argue against subsidizing what you consider to be poor life choices. Otherwise, it sounds like you only have an issue with poor life choices when it doesn't directly impact you. In other words, because you won't accept subsidized contraception no-one should be allowed to have subsidized contraception... but God forbid anyone refuse to subsidize that extra cheeseburger you had (or any unhealthy choice you make). | Again, that's news to me. I don't know the first thing about making explosives, I just know where to get the information if I really wanted it (which, as I don't have farmland to clear and have no intention of murdering people, I don't want the information). But, seeing as how it's even easier than I previously thought... again the original point stands. People will kill if people want to kill. |
His argument is based on the fact that <PERSON>'s longitude coordinates are all tightly internally consistent but systematically divergent from real coordinates, and that the divergence is based on a misinterpretation of the zero-point as the Canary Islands, when in fact it was referring to the Lesser Antilles. <PERSON> describes the shape of the archipelago as being distributed North/South, which is almost perpendicular to how the Canaries are distributed but describes the Antilles well. His paper is [here](https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01275282/document), he gets to the claim in question around page 13. He also has an hour long lecture on youtube which I haven't watched, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzlF1eggBig
Anyway, how reasonably and seriously-taken is this claim? | <PERSON> definitely did not come up with the three laws of motion all on his own; he relied on over a hundred years of research in the science of mechanics (i.e. the science of motion) when he produced the *Principia*, his major scientific work, which is where the three laws come from. It's important to point out that the reason the *Principia* was so important was not because it contained many major results (although it did), it was because **it introduced a method of dealing with the science of mechanics: forces, which could be manipulated mathematically via calculus.**
The simplest and most common way to express where <PERSON>'s laws came from is this: The first law (law of inertia) was definitely not discovered by <PERSON>; it was a cornerstone of <PERSON>'s mechanics, and had been well known for over fifty years before the *Principia* (<PERSON> explicitly credits <PERSON> for the first law). The second law (F=ma) was a concept that was 'floating around' at the time; similar ideas had been expressed by people like <PERSON> before <PERSON>. What <PERSON> did for the second law was express it in his new terminology, forces, and show how this was a powerful way of tackling problems. The third law (to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction) is all <PERSON>; you really can't come up with this law unless you have a concept of forces, and seeing as <PERSON> is the only one with a concept of forces it's pretty obvious that it had to be essentially all his own work.
So who discovered what?
First law: Discovered by <PERSON>.
Second law: Various people, <PERSON> makes an important contribution.
Third law: Discovered by <PERSON>.
As for <PERSON>'s fondness for the bible; although <PERSON> spent many many years studying the bible, there is no evidence it had an impact on his work on mechanics. <PERSON>'s major breakthrough was introducing forces to mechanics, an idea which he very clearly took from his work on alchemy. |
Well, I think it's got something to do with evolution - I don't think he ([<PERSON>/wiki/Terence_McKenna#.22Stoned_ape.22_theory_of_human_evolution) was proposing that it had an immediate reaction. It's just a hard theory to believe, or even prove. But as other users have mentioned, we don't exactly have a reasoning for the catalyst of consciousness - so it's as good as any. | As other commenters have said, the situation was more serious than that. But, it's supposed to emphasise the horrific reality of the wholesale rejection of God and his prophets by the people of God. Read the rest of 2 Kings if you haven't already - it gets much worse than that. |
> So how can any of this be squared with ethics in a civilized modern society, where democratic accountability is an entrenched norm in government, reckless endangerment and torture are prosecuted as criminal offenses, punishments are not supposed to be sensitive to social status, and association doesn't imply guilt?
If it can't, then why is that a problem?
Presumably the answer to that is "because the theism of Christianity is false." But that needs to be demonstrated. The fact that we currently don't like the implications of it has no bearing on whether it's true or false, and whether its true or false has everything to do with whether it has normative force.
> If God's ways are infinitely just, then why shouldn't we strive to copy the above on Earth: abolish equality, democracy, and rule of law, and go back to feudal hierarchy and the divine right of kings?
If the theism of Christianity is true, then perhaps we should. Democracy and equality are probably unjustified for unrelated reasons.
I think what you mean to ask is whether Christian theology is compatible with modern morality. Phrased in this more illuminating way, the question is a lot less interesting; the answer is almost certainly "no." A much more interesting question is "what justifies our modern notions of morality?" | > Theologians would argue that instead you should care about whether Human's values are Godlike in order to resolve this problem...as in, if you do something that you believe is good but god believes is evil, then it's evil because God knows better than you by definition.
Then the question becomes whether human values are similar enough to God that his judgements are actually worthwhile. Also, if you redefine good and evil like that, we'll need new words to describe the human values, because they distinction is meaningful from an axiological perspective, even if they're materially equivalent, because you cannot point out the material equivalence without drawing the distinction.
> Any being that shares my will entirely is literally just me. Like, if there was one computer program A, and another computer program B that is designed to do the same thing as A exactly, then the two programs are equivalent.
Not if there are other differences between them, but either way, the analogy falls apart when God has a broader range of outputs (by being omnipotent) than humans do.
> Would you get married to a robot woman who literally could not, by design, disagree with you? Or would you get married to a woman who could disagree with you if necessary, but usually didn't because of your shared goals?
I wouldn't likely get married to a woman, either way :P
Going with the sense of the question, though, there's a certain variance within value systems (both aesthetic and ethical ones) that's entirely unproblematic (and certainly does not call for divine punishment in places of disagreement) and there's also a certain point where the variance becomes too large for the relationship to work out.
> This is the most interesting part of your response and does cut to things I actually believe. What do you mean about this? I think I understand the relationship you are claiming, but I want you to explicitly spell it out so I don't misunderstand you.
Well, if we assume that the rules of the universe are turing computable, then they're also deterministic, and then we can ennumerate them as a basis for <PERSON>'s theory of inductive reasoning. That all seems like a very sensible reason to infer induction is valid, but if the world is nondeterministic, then it is not turing-computable and that sorta breaks <PERSON> induction, so I would wonder what other reasons there would be to accept induction. After all, appealing to its track record is itself inductive reasoning, hence circular. |
Yes.
Term limits on every single political position, life in jail if you're proven to have accepted any lobbying benefits, and make it illegal for any former politician to work in a field they've had direct impact on as a Politician.
That would solve 90% of the problems the US political system has today. | The EU Is actually doing this through it's soft power in a sense.
Being the largest economic community in the globe gives the EU massive leverage in Free trade agreements, and a lot of values that could be considered western or european (the rule of law, stable democratic institutions, a free market economy, etc) are a requirement for these free trade agreements.
In terms of actually spreading it's influence across the european continent itself, one only has to look at the [Copehagen Criteria](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_criteria) and the [Acquis_communautaire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acquis_communautaire) |
Oh, for sure.
If I don't know if I like a person I will usually end up paying for most of it, in essence "Buying my way out of the date."
If I like them, I will let them treat, knowing I will beyond make it up to them.
If we are dating and he is broke, I will pay for way more. If he makes way more I will let him pay a larger share.
But it still feels weird for someone to ask me out, then ask me to pay for myself. I would want that to be established as a "if you want to grab dinner one day, let me know" or something casual like that. Something like a Chipotle would be ideal because you can just pay for own at the register.
But like I said, the date usually equals out in cost. One person pays for first half, and the other for the second.
If paying is an issue, I am happy with going for a walk or whatever. | That is a nice thought, but if someone does not have any skills no one will hire them.
Imagine if you want a cleaning lady. You are willing to pay $100 a month for one. Your neighbor would be willing to do it for $100. She is already doing her place, she can just keep going and clean your place
Now, we say that wage is too low. She needs to be paid $200. Now, you just say screw it and clean your own house. There is a job destroyed. You either do it yourself or live in a dirtier house.
Minimum wage jobs are
Mostly small businesses. Many won't be able to get off he ground. |
> Also, if you acknowledge your awkwardness with people then they'll be inclined to see your efforts from your perspective.
And will be inclined to pity you, which is still worse than being ignored.
> What you call being pitied, others call empathy
You feel empathy towards your peers. You feel pity towards those you consider lower than you or worse off than you. With them, peerness will never be an option, because you'll have that pity you felt for them present all the time. | > Patriotism in fact is a form of social behaviour where you seek something to be for others AND you. Not primarily for you. Which is not intrinsicly bad.
Thinking just of oneself isn't intrinsically bad either, and you shouldn't think of it that way. Thinking only of one's own self may result in less well-being overall, but that does not make it "bad." Perhaps less preferable.
> Wouldnt it be better if we shared this privilege with everyone not only a few?
Yes, it would. It's July 4, but have you donated to the Against Malaria Foundation? Do you think it's wrong for the people who have played a part in making their own society successful to celebrate and show their patriotism? My point is that you can do both.
|
In theory, I think I should be as close to zero in terms of comment karma as possible. If too many people agree with what I say, then I am in danger of just being another mindless person being swept along on the currents of popular opinion. It is healthy for people's belief systems to be challenged once in a while.
But I agree that arguing about comments is a waste of time. If you make a good point to begin with then there is no need to elaborate too much more about it. | Some people's reaction can be so sensitive that they can go into anaphylaxis simply by being next to someone with peanut butter.
Edit: Don't mind me for stating a fact. Downvote me by assuming my position for the sake of being antagonistic. I guess I will state my opinion now: children obviously should be allowed to bring peanut butter to school. And those with allergies are the ones that need to be careful, not those without the allergy
I think one problem within the reddit community is that people assume you disagree with them unless you expressly state that you agree with them. Simply adding information to a topic without taking a stance is frowned upon around here |
I'm atheist as well but I show respect to people. If I'm at a dinner table and my hosts say grace I simply lower my head and observe a moment of silence in my head. If you want respect for being an atheist show respect to those around you.
I've been in some very religious homes and it has never been an issue. Even after they find out I'm atheist later if I decide to tell them at all they appreciate I didn't make a big deal out of what is important to them. | People throw stuff at me all the time. Yes there is a little bit of truth in what they say but most of it is wrong and just assumptions. I just keep up on the gospel of my religion and I can argue against them if they are willing to argue. If not I just walk away it's not worth hearing my religion dragged through the dirt with false statements. |
>Edit: I also remember a passage about gods and people interbreeding somewhere in the first chapters of Genesis
Genesis 6:1-4 doesn't (at least, explicitly) refer to "gods," but rather to "the sons of God." Some ancient commentators considered them to be angels or demons (marrying humans); others considered them to be godly humans (marrying unbelievers).
>When man began to multiply on the face of the land and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of man were attractive. And they took as their wives any they chose. Then the Lord said, “My Spirit shall not abide in man forever, afor he is flesh: his days shall be 120 years.” The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of man and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown. | >The problem, though, is that an unknowable plan could be used to explain away literally anything without adding any actual understanding. My point is simply that attributions to the unknowable are just ignorance with a middleman. To say that any of us couldn't do better just leaves me with the question "Better that what, exactly?"
The question isn't better than what. The OP isn't trying to figure what we currently have; he's aware of that and believes he could do better given God's gifts. Yes, there's no way to say that God's wrong if his plan's unknowable. But that's part of the point too. It *is* incredibly arrogant and stupid for any of us to say that we could do better than someone who is all-knowing and all-powerful. It would be like me saying I could do a better job figuring out how to travel time than <PERSON> if I had all his mental faculties. How could I possibly know that not possessing them?
>You already have the final product in front of you and can see how all the steps led up to it.
Fair point, but part of God's handiwork is done and available for our viewing. His creation is still majestic and amazing, even with the sin that has corrupted it. We can still see that and see how great it is. And chances are, even before ol' <PERSON>'s painting was done I'd have a good idea that it was going to be incredible.
>Tell me about this plan you see.
I see God creating a perfect world, with his creation living in harmony with him, but possessing free will. This creation rejects him and brings punishment to themselves for it. I see in the history of the Bible God continually reaching out for his people, guiding them to follow him, giving them prophecies, or hints of his plan. I see him becoming one of us, experiencing first hand what we've done to our world, and the pain and sorrow in it. I see him fulfill the prophecies, and die on our behalf, taking all of the deserved punishment for us, and redeeming us from this mess we've made.
If it were truly random, then everything should be random. There should be societies that value selfishness and cowardice. Morality shouldn't be a slightly different set of codes from nation to nation, it should be completely different through and through. We should never know that something we are doing is wrong, because where on earth does would that idea even come from? |
Ok fine, they are in those markets already, but then they would focus their attention on the markets that are left because of the loss of the US.
Anyway, your argument is based on the idea that China would just let a massive source of income just vanish into thin air with no recourse. There is no reason that would happen. | I see what you are saying in the second half, but to me I see that it is a good way to show privilege because it is giving women the same job when many cannot even come close to base physical requirements.
If you don't think that different physical requirements is an example of female privilege then I really don't think the conversation will be fruitful. |
Back in my days of retail the jobs were meant to be easy, but were always seriously tedious. Anything a customer can do to draw out my day helps. There was a finite amount of work to do and a finite amount if time I could hide in the back room. I was over joyed (sadly) that people would leave shit they didn't want anymore in the wrong department, or the vendors fucked up the cooler area being messy and shit. It's 8 hours, who gives a fuck how it's filled, you're time is dictated by the clock anyway. | I work 8 hours everyday but I have only 2 hours or so of work to do per day. I would love to have things to do. This job has really increased my anxiety, if I'm having trouble with my life I have 40 hours a week to just stew in it with no real distractions. I'm stuck here until we find a house, as job jumping looks very bad on loan applications, but as soon as I can I am out. I'm so fucking bored I actually miss retail. |
Man... I'm turning 23 and still kissless... Reading all this shit on this sub with "my crush is now my gf" "i just had my first kiss omg most magicla moment in my life" has seriously made me depressed as fuck....
Fuck I'M so GOD DAMN sad after reading shite like this yet I purposely fucking do it to myself to torture myself.
The one thing I refuse to try is the internet though. I'm a homely, lonely, extra skinny, nerdy, fucking loser hopeless dipshit. I don't even meet girls due to studying programming in school.
What girl would be interested? Online dating is just apparently from what I hear hundreds of rejections. I mean you said you were honest, so you told her you were a handholdless virgin? I thought that'd send girls running the other direction.
I need to get out of this cause I'm headed dead fucking straight to suicide. I want to try online dating but my life is so dull and I'm so inexperienced and have so many problems that I'm afraid to.
This shit was sad enough at 18, at 20 its just pathetic, now at 23 it feels like hope has died entirely. At 25 I don't want to know, etc. | Could it be ipobrichiophobia? I dont tell anyone I have that but I hate hate HATEEE looking at submarines when they're completely under deep water. I had this dream once where there was 20 subs some ontop and some submerged in a grouped clump and they were slowly following me and i had to outswim then in the middle of the ocean.
fuckkkkk meeee... |
Not sure I buy into the "social benefit" angle. I mean it's a rational choice, but not part of our biology. Sexual selection is still very very primal. Which is the point of this post.
The selection of a mate which carries gay genes (if such a thing) would have to be naturally occurring, not random, to discredit it being a defect. | First point, people have been circumcised as adults. So they can certainly attest to the changes. Some say it's worse, some say it isn't - seems to vary. It is a fact that the lost tissue has sensory nerves in it though, so it does make sense that for some it'd be notably worse.
Second point, people make it and I always find it completely baffling. You can always learn to last longer in bed. They even make products specifically to reduce sensation. Try a condom or creams. You can't learn to make your penis physically feel more. |
My point is that men are automatically judged more harshly simply for being men, prima facie, without weighing the actual damage. If a man hits a woman in public and does x damage (let's say some slight redness to the cheek), he will almost surely be spoken to and/or threatened by a nearby male, whereas if a woman hits a man with the same force, nobody will say a damn thing. It's a very well established double standard that everyone acknowledges and supports. Merely *challenging* the double standard leads people to view you as a misogynist. | Like I said *multiple times* already, it's the **specific excuse** that's the issue. I'm giving you some basic facts about our society. If you bury your head in the sand because you want to exercise your male privilege without concern, that's your problem. But don't think you won't look like a giant ass to everyone else. |
I think you could run, but it would definitely used against you by your opposition. Plus, you'd likely have to renounce the other citizenship at least by the time you're sworn in. Even the president/vp's support staff (mess staff, medical personnel, etc) must be free of "all foreign influence" to gain the proper security clearance.
| Then you're an independent. Vote for the candidate that you feel is the most honest. Also, try to think what they can realistically achieve vs what they want. For example, I doubt <PERSON> could manage to get congress to pass a bill to build a giant wall or deport illegals, but I bet he might be able to increase funding for border patrol. |
Yeah, it was almost dare-I-say underwhelming after hearing the ridiculous trip reports from the kind of people OP is talking about. I was almost expecting some sort of lawnmower-man / matrix like experience, while it was more like simply turning up the patterns you normally see when closing your eyes to 11.
I also don't think it's something anyone would really get addicted to, considering there is a long refractory period and it's not the type of drug you can just buy on the corner. Took me almost 2 years since the first time to find another opportunity to do it. | That feeling is understandable. I suppose the best perspective I could offer is that our laws now already provide everyone to choose as they see fit. You will always have the freedom to choose not to personally bring a child with genetic disease into the world, and you will never have to live with that guilt.
But I think stepping beyond that and trying to dictate the morality of the decision for others is dangerous ground indeed. Disease prevention is normall a very straightforward thing, and when it comes to preventing say, type II diabetes in people who are already alive, I doubt you'd find hardly anyone who sees that push as controversial. Preventing disease by preventing human beings from coming into existence seems a different realm entirely however.
If you ask people who live with genetic disease for their views, I imagine you might find a diversity of viewpoints. But without a doubt, I think many of them would say, "I am still glad I'm alive, I have a loving, supportive family and there are so many things in life that I am thankful to have experienced despite my illness. It's not as though I wish I had never been born," and those feelings should not be discounted, should they? |
So you agree with me that voting for her because she's a woman is foolish, no? That's all I was saying. We agree then. I said originally it was just as stupid to vote for <PERSON> because he's black, just like it's stupid to vote for <PERSON> because he's Jewish or "An old white guy", just like it's stupid to vote for <PERSON> because she's a woman. | "If you are not rational, why should I give you reasons?"
How do you know you're rational? We could spend here all day. Let me show you an example:
If 3 people were on a judgment, the law states "non-guilty until proven wrong". That's the point an atheist would make. A theist, in this example, would say "Guilty", and they should prove it. A anti-theist, would say "innocent", and he should also show proof.
|
I don't think he is, i think he's just making sure. I don't think he meant are you a lawyer in a rhetorical question kind of way(rhetorical that the answer is obviously no he isn't). I think it was more of a "are you a lawyer??... because if you are then i'll probably PM you for further help" . It's hard to tell without knowing the guy and because it's just text. His answers are short though. | OK then your dad wouldn't vote regardless of registering. However i bet he knows about registering to vote. But there's ads in print online in person on TV all saying where to find info about registering. I can see people MAYBE not knowing about registering to vote but if you're actually interested in the political process you'll figure it out pretty quick. Similar to not having an ID. If you don't have one at this point either you're old/mentally ill or you intentionally don't want one. |
I once read a study that showed that hard drug users are actually far more likely to be cigarette smokers than cannabis users. Obviously that's not to say that cigarettes are any more of a "gateway drug" than weed is, but it just goes to show how weak the weed-hard drugs correlation is, and how meaningless those kinds of statistics are without actually having any factual link between the two. | I'd say it's impossible to know either way, but for all intents and purposes that are relevant to us, "outside our universe" does not exist in any meaningful way. The only reason we can make reasonable claims about how things work inside our universe is because we have the ability to observe it. |
Right. So if the theaters have no way to know how much they're losing because of people who don't want to risk a crying baby, it's unlikely they'd want to create a rule that would actually turn known paying customers away at the box office.
In the current system, you could report the offending party and get them kicked out and/or get your money back. Doesn't discriminate and actually deals with these problem on a case-by-case basis. | Attorneys aren't insurance agents. I'm neither.
That said, you should try to work it out with him first. Tell him you'll contact his insurance, which will cause his rates to go up, if he can't follow through on the job he agreed to. Worst case scenario, he does nothing and you file a claim with your insurance against his insurance.
Since you just want it fixed, and the above would be a lengthy process, I'd recommend you just talk to him nicely and see if his best friend will speed up the job. |
Hey there, I study health care models for a living.
Allowing different prices for different groups means you'll have an uninsurable group of people. Simply put, there is very little chance a company will make money on a cancer patient. A company will make little money on many chronic diseases, and just some money on smokers and obese and so on. The super lucrative bunch are the healthy individuals.
The problem with OP's reasoning is that he* expects the market to work in providing health for everybody. It doesn't. It doesn't because there's such a steep increase in costs that you simply stop offering insurance to some (hint: it's a lot of) people.
Well, unless you don't expect the market to work and don't care at all about population health...
What every single country that wants to improve population health (hint: it should be all of them) has already realized is that you cannot allow the market to force a group out of health care. So, we "make a deal" with health insurance companies: balance your profit on the healthy with your losses on the sick. For this to happen, the market is regulated and private health companies can only differentiate based on a couple characteristics (age in most countries; there might be some that allows for age and sex).
**TL;DR**: it's time for the US to stop reinventing the wheel and just look at what is known to work in health care.
**Tl;DR for real:** balance your profit on the healthy with your losses on the sick instead of cherry picking the perfect client. | Not to mention that it's impossible to work proportionally hard enough to *earn* being rich comparative to the effort the average minimum wage worker puts in per hour.
Rich people who actually make their own fortune have somehow acquired more value to parlay into such contracts. This is not and cannot be *work effort* value.
There are a lot of jobs in the world that require PHDs and weekly overtime, in science fields for instance, that will never make a person rich, but require as much work effort and pre-training as a job generally can.
I know this isn't disagreeing with the post I'm directly replying to, more expounding on his statement to refute the post he/she replied to. |
I'd give it 1/10 simply because I am leaving the opportunity to lower it to a zero when students start shooting each other and we get American style mass shootings. We have the capacity, we are kinda right behind Americans on per capita gun ownership list.
Okay, that's only partially a joke, folks, realistically it's 3/10. Compulsory education itself is terrible and practically amounts to psychological torture of the young, but our system is even more terrible because the government just doesn't give a shit about education. If it were up to me, the current educational system would be dismantled over a period of a decade and reformed into a more democratic, participative and libertarian model. | Speaking realistically, yes, in any country where the population is in the millions and there is universal adult suffrage, your vote won't mean much as one vote. *Real* effects can be made with get out the vote campaigns, gathering groups to go, and requesting that groups you follow vote a certain way. Symbolically and technically though, your vote means something, as it says you are participating. You are at least trying.
Personally, I view it as an obligation. If I want to be proud of the fact that I'm an American I should participate in the democratic process. If that is a meaningless concept to you then I suppose the value of voting depends on the opportunity cost of doing so. If it takes 10 mins where you might be watching TV, then perhaps you might as well do it. You get to wear the sticker and feel patriotic for a bit. If it takes time out of your workday and a significant time to wait, then perhaps it's not worth it. |
That's a terrible line of reasoning. That's like saying "you can't explain a mathematical theory using mathematics." Yes. Yes you can.
The original question was "why is there something rather than nothing." It wasn't "explain everything in the world," it was just asking why there is something. In this question, an answer could be found. | This example has nothing to do with anything I said. Clearly, in unusual circumstances, a professor should allow a student to step out and use their phone. If the professor didn't work with you on that, then he was in the wrong.
That said, nothing in your story changes any of my points. |
From what I recall, a contract involves an exchange of some sort. If you didn't give them any money, then there would be no contract. Moreover, I don't think that they can hold you on the basis of a rental application, since that is only the beginning of negotiations, usually.
In other words, almost certainly not. | >Do you understand that the reproduction of genes has to have law pertaining to it in the universe?
So you assert. I don't have much of a background in biology, so I cannot say that I have much of an opinion on the matter, but the assertion of someone whose knowledge of evolution is limited to high school biology is hardly persuasive.
> The point is if there was not the capacity or ability of chemicals to interact to create genes by the allowance of laws to the universe. That they wouldn't do it.
Well, yes, but that doesn't prove anything. We are in a universe with genes, therefore it must be possible in out universe for genes to exist. This doesn't show anything about how the genes came to be in the first place, however. |
It's frustrating when they're eating your bumper for some time too. I'm passing cars, not able to move over just yet and some dude is just sniffing the exhaust of my car for like 5 car-passes, then I move over and they don't move...
Which can be hilarious considering I'm seeing tons of cars behind them and they're no longer passing, meanwhile I'm still pulling away. | I rather think it's because there's a lot more garbage on the web. If you cannot find exactly what you're looking for, the second page and most afterwards will be filled with ad-ridden spammy seo-crap sites. Whereas in the olden days there was more value in the remaining results. Even if you didn't find anything exactly, you could go through the rest of the results and still stumble upon domething valuable. |
You're thinking of things that matter when it comes to which *legal parent* gets primary custody. In situations where there are multiple legal parents, courts heavily weigh the benefit of the kids.
This is an entirely different situation. It's extraordinarily difficult to take children away from a biological/legal parent and then give them to a non-relative.
Barring real, serious neglect or abuse, a biological parent generally has a very powerful right to raise their own children.
There still may be avenues for him to pursue here, but legally a biological parent is automatically entitled to raise their children as they see fit. It doesn't matter if they're bad people or if there might be a better household out there. Parents get to raise their own children. | I still think there are two points which militate for allowing incarcerated felons to vote.
First, it has a legitimate rehabilitative purpose. American prisons are *incredibly* harsh and punitive as it is. We do a really terrible job with rehabilitation. Allowing and encouraging inmates to have this freedom, and more broadly to engage with common causes outside the prison walls, is potentially very helpful in keeping inmates, almost all of whom are going to be out someday, connected to society.
Second, there is a very strong case that governments should not be able to exclude any citizen from the ballot box. Denying disfavored groups the right to vote, even if there's good reason behind the disfavor, is not acceptable. I think the strict scrutiny test should be applied to any denial of voting rights, and I don't think stopping incarcerated people from voting can possibly pass that test. |
Sounds from some of your other posts that these are really just friends of common circumstance. When you get out there and move on you will find friends that are more in line with you. Don't worry about it too much.
If you marry and have children it really won't matter a whole lot then. | The bank where the 405K was. They should be able to help you track down where it went via cancelled checks, wires, etc.
However, even if you find it in a bank in her name the bank won't just give it to you. You are going to have to have a court order.
You really should get an attorney. This is also likely a criminal matter for her and you will want to try to convince the police to act quickly before she spends it all. |
>I am exercising my own to state that I think something is bad.
And that's your right, it's not that you can't be objected to it, but what you are suggesting is that people be censored for public safety. You can't claim that's not an end goal because your way of thinking leads there. You can't just say "Well I'm against this thing because things and I think it should stop or change." and then claim that it's just an opinion. Your way of thinking has a logical conclusion, and no one is saying you can't say it, but the logical conclusion of your thoughts leads to censorship.
>I will admit that verbalizing this last point is a challenge for me, but I think there's a big difference between a video game, which is very divorced from reality, and a boxing movie, which portrays things anyone can readily participate in.
I was going to tell you about how [soldiers that come back from war commit an outstanding amount of crime per capita](http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-predicting-violent-crime-by-army-soldiers-20151006-story.html) and that [athletes commit half the crimes on average as the general population.](https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2013/07/01/the-myth-about-crime-and-pro-athletes/qlnKoSMkbhuImiS4pO87WJ/story.html) The difference being that both parties experience violence, but what separates them is whether or not they feel hopeless in their situation as well as other factors.
But I realized that like with any knowledge that we have it can be used for good and evil. I'm assuming that your view is that violence is wrong, and that we should avoid it at all costs. This is a noble way to think in our society, but it doesn't reflect reality. No matter how much other people agree, or how technological we get, there will always be violence. It's not something that is innate to humans, it's innate to life. All life commits violence, and even nature herself is a force of violence and death. When we have an element, or some kind of action that we can take, we can always apply a good or evil label to it. Good being that it serves people, and evil meaning that it hurts people. Violence will always hurt someone, but we use it to prevent to harm of others. Such as when we go to war, such as when we subdue an attacker, such as when we stop two children from fighting. We have to use force, big and small, in order to stop these events; although we can also use our words, violence is unavoidable. There will always be someone who wants to take something by force because they think that their own survival or needs are more important.
When we present violence in a positive light, we remind ourselves that this necessary thing that will never stop so long as there is life to carry it out, we remind ourselves that violence can be a force of good. Using it to defeat a great foe that threatens you, maybe for glory here, but it's for someones safety and even life in the real world. You think the way that you do because you were taught that violence was always evil, and that there is always a better solution. Sometimes though we have to decide to pull the trigger in order to save more lives, and if we denounce these brave people by saying their acts are evil inherit, we tell them that we are ungrateful for the sacrifice they make in order to keep us safe.
If you look up violence, you will most likely run into a negative connotation of it. We've taught ourselves that violence is negative, and it reflects our treatment of Vets. I'm not saying that you are resenting vets, but that "Those who 'abjure' violence can do so only because others are committing violence on their behalf." - <PERSON> | >Is it a bad thing to be an extremist?
Nope. It's bad to judge animal rights activists by their extremist elements. For example I don't like you for being willing to attack and terrorize people to achieve your political goals, but I don't judge all ARAs by that.
>The threat of either working for a boss or starvation is violence.
It's really not. You don't have to work for a boss, and they don't use violence to get you to do so because violence involves force. If you were characterizing society accurately, then all unemployed people would be starving. This isn't the case; starvation is almost nonexistent in our society even among those without jobs.
>I don't know if you realize this but the police are exactly the people that enforce the property status of animals.
The police enforce the laws. Change the laws, and you change what they enforce. It's not that difficult to grasp.
Likewise, the police enforce the laws that prevent violence from being done against ARAs. Ergo, ARAs need not use violence themselves.
>I doubt that they'll just voluntarily say that we're right and that they'll stop
So you're going to visit violence upon them until they capitulate to your demands? I'm glad you're not running things.
The best way to effect change is through non-violent means. Violence will just galvanize the average public against your movement because they will see you as a violent group foremost. You would probably care about that sort of thing, unless you're going for some sense of vengeance on behalf of animals instead of what's more likely to work, in which case there's no arguing except to say that vengeance is an immoral thing to want. |
> I will change my view if someone can show with a clear and convincing argument that it is possible to create a system wherein districts are redrawn consistently and reliably without regard to the desired political outcome of the person(s) doing the redistricting.
Iowa has been successful in tackling gerrymandering. It has a [non-partisan committee in charge](http://www.timesunion.com/opinion/article/Gerrymandering-Not-in-Iowa-1336319.php) of drawing up the borders of electoral districts. It also has a law that prohibits really weird shapes used to make up electoral districts:
> Iowa law further requires that districts be reasonably compact in shape -- defined as "square, rectangular, or hexagonal ... and not irregularly shaped," and there are factors the agency is prohibited from considering.
It can be done, but it'll only get done if citizens ask for it. And they need to ask LOUDLY!
| > When companies making horse-drawn carriages had to adjust to the automobile, was that like shaming a rape victim? When companies making floppy discs had to adjust to newer technology making them obsolete, was that like shaming a rape victim? When polluters had to adjust to the Clean Air Act or segregationists had to adjust their businesses to the Civil Rights Acts, are you also going to compare that to blaming the victim of a violent sexual assault?
The difference is that horse-drawn carriage companies and floppy disk companies didn't fail because of a crime committed by their consumers. Telling them to change because demand is going down is legitimate, and similarly, telling a women not to dress slutty because she might get ogled is legitimate. Not wanting a floppy disk isn't illegal, and ogling women isn't illegal in general. Telling the victim of a crime that they need to change is bad, telling the "victim" of something that isn't a crime that they need to change isn't bad. |
> If the Biblical accounts were what happened, wouldn't it be expected that there were no accurate accounts that contradict the divinity of <PERSON>?
Yes, absolutely! But I would expect *more*. The Bible seems like pretty weak sauce when it comes to proof. Why so few authors of the material? Why don't we see 100 accounts of Matthew 27:50-54?
Why don't we see writing from *all over the region* about the events of Mark 15:33?
If the stuff in the Bible really happened, most people would have been *falling over one another* to become Christians. They weren't.
Also, what about all the writings that were *excluded* from the Bible (apocrypha)? Why didn't the Bible compilers put those in?
>By assuming there were, and asking for, contradictory accounts, you seem to be coming from this from the point of view of "it's false, so how do we disprove it", which is an incredibly biased attitude, and leads you to circular logic that doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
Eh, more like "We have an extremely narrow window into this time and place and I want more/better evidence to believe actual miracles happened". I say the same about any holy book, the Bible doesn't get special/extra scrutiny.
>Agreed, it is an omnibus of all accurate writings/reporting of events from Judea that involve <PERSON>
Says who? | I'm not sure how you would like someone to prove "beyond a reasonable doubt" that Christianity is wrong. There is no evidence, save the Bible, that Christianity is correct. I assume you will admit that, at best, the Bible is a biased source.
If Christianity was the one true religion, don't you think there would be more evidence of <PERSON>' miracles? Some evidence of a Jewish man rising from the dead? Something beyond a single book?
My arguments against *Pascal's Wager* is a moral one. If God was so malevolent as to send a good person to eternal torture simply because they didn't believe in him--that is not a god I can worship in good conscience. That would make him utterly evil. At least <PERSON>'s torture of the Jews was finite. According to Christian teachings, God is *literally* worse than <PERSON>.
My second response to <PERSON> Wager* is that it isn't complete. His wager states:
>If you believe in God and he does not exist--you have lost nothing. If you believe in God and he does exist--you have gained everything. If you do not believe in God and he does not exist--you have lost nothing. If you do not believe in God and he does exist--you have lost everything.
I believe there is another option. You believe in God(Christian god, hence the capitalization) and he does not exist, but another jealous god(we'll call him "<PERSON>") does exist. <PERSON> cannot abide by someone worshipping a false god, but he doesn't care if you don't worship anyone else. So those who believe in <PERSON> go to heaven. Those who believe in **no** god also go to heaven. Those who believe in any god but <PERSON> go to hell.
Any god in history has an equal chance of being the true god as the Christian God does. |
I get that you don't feel that way. You don't have to defend yourself. But, something I was wondering after reading your comment is that it seems like the woman has to dress to avoid what a potential rapist would find attractive. I'm dealing out of my element here since I'm not a rapist, but I would imagine that men who rape women find many different women potential targets. Some want their female targets to be meek. Some want their targets to be strong. Some are drawn to women who dress more sexy. Some are intimated by women who dress more sexy and would be attracted to a woman who dresses more plain. There isn't one particular look that is sought by all rapists. We can't really expect a woman to think of all these things when she decides on what outfit to wear. It isn't possible to play a game of mental dodge ball vs. every man who might rape her. | You're interpreting my confidence and annoyance as aggression.
I'm interpreting your analysis as the equivalent of lecturing birds on how to fly. You're complaining about nature at a time in human development where you have access to more information about how to bypass nature than ever before. That article you linked proves that.
Anyway, you're complaining that short dudes have to work harder. I agree, but I don't agree that online dating makes that any different. The fact that you haven't figured out to just lie on your profile to get passed the filters you find morally objectionable simply means you haven't been creative enough.
The article you linked says women like a guy that can break the rules and you're sitting here complaining about the rules you're following.
I'm not suggesting you actually try to hide your height, but you can put 5'10" and then make a comment about why the filters are hiding your short but manly existence from the ladies...and how the ladies are silly for filtering out possibly amazing man meat such as yourself.
If you have to work hard in person by having more personality, it's no different online. You just have to defy norms. We all do, really....just in different ways. |
Good question. While it's true that there are also rational reasons to reduce the poverty rate, I'm just saying that emotion, compassion, and basic humanity do ultimately come into how we treat the poor and disadvantaged. A *purely* rational society which had no concern for the idea of human dignity or empathy might try to save money on law enforcement not by helping the poor out of poverty, but by allowing the police to perform summary executions of repeat offenders. Bullets being cheaper than job training programs, this would be justified by pure logic.
Anyway my point is that *both* logical and emotional/ethical concerns motivate lawmakers, and that if all subjective considerations are eliminated, and law is made solely by reference to facts and conclusions deduced from facts by the rules of logic, you're going to get some results which in the real world are pretty messed up. As <PERSON> famously said, “'Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger." | Stating an opposing viewpoint is not a compelling argument for changing another person's mind. However, I will point out my objection with your statement:
>but what does not exist in nature is the recognition that natural righs should not be infringed.
>We all have the right to... act in whatever way we please.
So what rights exist in nature? Do I not have a natural right to murder, or is my right to murder simply insufficient to override your right to live?
If so, it demonstrates that rights can be taken away by social construct. And I would argue that the rights which were taken away to form our society were, in at least some ways, arbitrary. Therefore a society which lacks out set of "inalienable rights" could exist, wherein one has a different set of rights. |
Is he/she over 18? Please tell me he/she is over 18. If so, the only risk you face is your job.
I suppose just play dumb, and claim it was innocent. I dunno though, I'd have to assume they fire you over it. Yeah, I understand you were not over the top and it was innocuous, but still, she filed a complaint and now the school has to do something about it | Well personally, I don't know if it's because I'm asexual but someone who's pretty is just pretty. Nothing more. Kind of like how I'd look at a pretty drawing. I do love beauty though, whether it's on humans or objects. I just don't think it's a crucial trait.
I have felt legitimate love for only one person in my life, and to this day I think she is the most attractive person ever. Physically? She is average, plus some things people may consider flaws (acne, big nose). At first, she was just a friend I really liked talking with. And then as our friendship grew, I started loving her. I'm a girl and I didn't know I was able to love a girl so much, but I did. I don't know if that's how true friendship works lol but oh well.
And the more I loved her, the more attractive she became. Everything about her, from her appearance to her personality, to her voice, to her lack of rhythm, her overuse of filters when taking pictures, everything was just attractive. I liked that about her, and I liked her for that.
So basically, I think attraction should be more than physical. I find it ridiculous when people only go for people they find "hot" at first glance. I think in order to find the most attractive person, you have to talk to them and get to know them. Develop a friendship or something. |
I had a big presentation similar to the scale you're experiencing and the night before, I practiced my speech and watched a few of <PERSON>'s speeches and practiced his mannerisms. It helped me give a pretty good (though not great 'cause I made a few mistakes) presentation. Give it your best shot, present the info in a concise and interesting manner, speak directly to the audience instead of just reciting your speech, and act alive (either by establishing your presence in the room or with humour, whatever's appropriate). | Had a sort of reconnection with my best friend (he's long distance for now and haven't had much time to skype and hang the past week or so) and this hunk came to my building on the other side of campus looking to visit me, so my day is awesome. Got a nice, long bike ride I'm looking forward to tomorrow so I'm getting hyped. What's up with y'all? :) |
If she was with you less than 5 months, then it doesn't sound like a huge deal to lose her.
And if she was with you more than 5 months, obviously she didn't see in you what she saw in the other guy, so why would you want her? Let her be his problem. | When I was in high school more than 10 years ago, everyone put phone numbers in yearbooks. It is going to take more than that to get her to call you. A yearbook message is usually an impersonal way to get the message across, which I guess is probably part of the appeal to you since it takes the pressure off to actually talk to her personally, but that makes it a poor way of actually communicating.
If you are interested in the girl, then while you're signing her yearbook, make conversation with her and tell her you'd like to hang out this summer. I.e., ask her out the old-fashioned way. Then get her to sign *your* yearbook, with *her* number. Call her two weeks after the school year ends. |
No one cares about the Muslims? Lebanon/Beirut has a significant Christian population, and has probably even had a Christian majority at some points in history.
I was just saying people here are probably less likely to know about Beirut than Paris, so they wouldn't know how to distinguish it from the rest of the Middle East.
I was gonna add that media coverage adds to public awareness. People know more about the Paris attack than the one in Beirut probably because they're being shown more. All this backlash against people caring so much about Paris instead of Beirut is probably leading to people knowing more about Beirut.
I just think it's petty that people are acting smug toward people caring about the attack in Paris and being ignorant about other situations. It's so holier-than-thou. It's really not their fault that certain things are being brought into their attention more than others. | Preliminary steps make up a huge part of what animal models are used for nowadays, especially since stuff like MD50 tests are the ones consuming large numbers of animals for each test. Tissue engineering has the potential to make huge numbers of lab animals obsolete.
Not sure what you mean by "mental diseases". If you're talking about stuff like depression, lab animals won't be of much use either. If you're talking about diseases with known molecular causes such as Alzheimer's or Parkinson's, cell culture is actually much more useful than animals, because it can be much easier and much more closely monitored. More importantly still, you can monitor cultured cells while they're still alive, which is somewhat harder to do if you're using animal brains. Tissue culture also allows for useful tools like microscopy, anti-body staining or molecular markers. |
I hear "I don't wanna because I don't have to".
Picture yourself having a life YOU create instead of living under mom's roof.
Allow the mild discomfort of not wanting to do stuff to just flow right on through you as you do the tasks. That will allow you to mature | It might be better to look at it as if they are going through different stages in their life...
You are born, you learn about the world, you rebel against it, you learn to accept why the world is the way it is, and you handle the responsibilities as you go along.
Sounds like the "thinker" are teenagers trying to figure out why everything is upside down and the world is unfairly cruel. Some blame it on anxiety or pressure as to why we think about it. It is part of growing up. We all go through that stage thinking "DOES NOBODY THINK ABOUT THIS?!"
Skepticism is healthy to a degree, till it gets in the way of being able to take care of yourself. Everyone is skeptical, but they also have needs. Some are more vocal about it. Your skepticism would all but vanish if you had the choice to die or follow what everyone before you has ever done.
People are simply that: people. Dividing them up the way you are almost discredits billions of people's life stories and experiences and ideas in their lifetimes. And of those billions of people, there are hundreds of billions of years of stories that you'll never hear about or get around to knowing.
**TL;DR: The Human Experience is a bitch.** |
Call the court. Find out if this is something you can ask for the day of court.
It's also possible, given this is a minor offense, that the court will waive jail (meaning there can only be a fine imposed). If that's the case, you aren't entitled to one. But, right now, you should absolutely see if you can get one and they'll advise you going forward. | Talk to an attorney. Beyond the cost of possible fines, a conviction will be on your record and could cause trouble with jobs, housing, public assistance, and a host of other areas of your life. An attorney may be well worth the expense.
It is possible you'll lose your job. That is regardless if you're guilty or not. Generally, your employer can fire you for any reason or none at all. |
Haha okay, I'm glad it's not just me then. It's tough sometimes, when I was younger I gave up on drawing for a while but then I went back to that art life again because I remembered how much I love it. That's what it's all about.
Yeah agreed 100%, the best books are the ones that make me feel empty at the end, like I've lost a part of myself. Sounds terrible and it kinda is, finishing a book can be bittersweet, but it's so cool that a work of fiction can have that much meaning for me. I wanna do that, itd be awesome if you can too.
Idk what I was thinking of then. Oh well. So you're more into the world building aspect? I like getting into the lore, I get so into character development, spend all this time with backstories and planning out. I like fantasy, sci fi, and horror mainly. The one I'm working on is a sci fi/dark comedy kinda thing. | You gotta make yourself happy with yourself. It'll take a little time but focus on good parts of your day or your life and yourself. Be confident. Forget that girl, improve yourself and find a better one who will give you the time of day no questions asked. You're in advanced classes you should feel good about that, but the stress can be tougher. Try to manage your work so you can use the rest of your time for yourself. This is very temporary, believe me I've been there. Just know you need to do it yourself and you totally can. |
It blows my mind that South Park is still on really after all these years. Like I remember hearing that song on the previews at <PERSON> and South Park still feeling new and now I can watch it and listen to that whole album in seconds 17 years later | No I'm with you. I understand it being more frustrating when there's more cars on the road but seriously if it's an empty road at 6AM just pass wherever one pleases and leave people alone. If this guy was trying to prove a point to <PERSON> at 6AM on empty roads that shit is cringeworthy |
Are you talking about pedestrians who are already in the crosswalk, or also people waiting to cross? I'll assume you're including the latter, since no reasonable person would drive straight through a pedestrian in the street.
Both the driver and the pedestrian will waste more time if the driver stops, than if he keeps going.
**Situation A: Driver stops for pedestrian**
1. Driver comes to a stop.
2. Pedestrian waits to make sure the car is stopped for him.
3. Pedestrian crosses.
4. Driver continues driving.
**Situation B: Driver keeps going**
1. Driver drives though the crosswalk slowly enough to stop in case the pedestrian runs into the street.
2. Pedestrian crosses.
In Situation B, both people can get on their way faster. The driver doesn't have to stop, and the pedestrian and simply cross after the car has passed. It takes time for the car to stop, so the pedestrian will be waiting roughly the same amount of time either way.
(Edited for clarity) | It's always fun when the asshole BMW behind you starts tailgating you, or weaving between lanes to get ahead regardless of whether they're in the fast lane or not. Even though you might be going over the limit, you're not going quite fast enough for them. You let them pass when the chance arises.
He shoots off at >100mph. Five miles down the road later, you see some flashing lights, and him pulled up on the side of the road in front of them.
If you're going to speed, never be the fastest guy speeding, nor the slowest: You'll either be the first to meet a waiting police car ahead, or the one going just slow enough for one to approach you from behind. |
It's your good right to hate the Jews and the actions of their democratic national state. It's your good right to demand that their state should cease to exist. It's your good right to demand that the jews cease to exist. But you shouldn't be mad to be told off as an antisemite.
There are how many democratic national states in the world?
Yet there's just this boycott Israel movement. Because the JEW "stole Palestinian land". You don't use that term for whatever happened in Europe in the 40s; you don't use that term for the colonial nations like America, Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada etc down the alphabet. You don't use that term for what <PERSON> and <PERSON> have done in England.
It's just the Jew who capable of doing evil to a very large part of the (post-)Christian public. What is it if not antisemitism? | The Umayyads elevated syria and the levant in importance at the expense of arabia for their own political ends; this is where the idea that jerusalem represented the "furthest mosque" was developed. <PERSON>'s visit to the city predates any association of jerusalem with the "furthest mosque". In fact, stories from the era criticize <PERSON>, a jewish convert, for suggesting that <PERSON> build a mosque on the site of the jewish temple as an attempt to infiltrate jewish ideas into islam.
And, of course, the "furthest mosque" is the only mention to jerusalem in the qur'an. |
> Should I start sending subpoena's
Hell no. You have an attorney *for a reason*. Your 'scorched earth' ideas aren't going to help you get out of jail, they're likely going to do no more than annoy the judge, your lawyer and the courthouse staff.
As is, you can't just "send subpoena's". You have to request them through the court, serve them properly, and handle the returns properly.
If you think you can do a better job, fire your attorney and go *pro se*. It is definetly **not** a course I recommend, but you can do it. | > he knew all along as is doing this to avoid leaving, paying rent, and trying to get his rent back or us to pay him off.
This is quite possibly true. And the laws of the state of new york pretty much actively encourage tenants to do this, so it will work out quite well for him.
He can't get back rent. That's spelled out in the statute. But he can get everything else he asked for and more, you'll have a *hell* of a time evicting him, and none of the tenants need to pay rent until you either get him out or make the unit legal.
I know you see this as a backhanded trick. A court will see this as a tenant doing exactly what the legislature allows tenants to do in order to punish illegal apartments. |
[What Sweden has are collective bargaining agreements covering each economic sector.] (http://www.worker-participation.eu/National-Industrial-Relations/Countries/Sweden/Collective-Bargaining) So there is no universal minimum wage set by government but there is an effective minimum wage in each sector that has been negotiated by labour and employer organizations. Switzerland does not have a minimum wage (except for domestic workers) but a few of its cantons have implemented or started the process of implementing one recently. [Switzerland does have some sectoral collective bargaining but these agreements cover just half of workers.]( http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/swiss_news/Calls_for_a_minimum_wage_mount.html?cid=31977734) | We have been quite active in that field. Since 1956 over 50000 Finnish soldiers have served in 30 different UN, EU and NATO peace keeping operations. Our peacekeeping troops are gathered from FDF professional soldiers, reservist and civilians who have mission appropriate skills. Before leaving they get necessary training in the Crisis Management Centre of [Pori Brigade.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pori_Brigade) There are no controversies for sending troops to peacekeeping missions. |
I have no interest in the matter as I don't go to gyms in the USA.
I'm just baffled at the way people contort themselves to contradict anything that would be for men.
>And no, I never said "Some are correct" so that's not an assertion I made. I think you missed the point of my words.
You never gave a criterium to make a distinction between the ones we should correct and which not. So that's an empty statement, which won't help us settle the discussion. | >you know what? if you don't understand what you are talking about we don't have anything to talk about. and you drop this gem on top of that:
End of invasion of Poland. 6 October 1939.
Attack on Pearl habour. 7 December 1941.
>you are trying to paint it like that, not me.
Your whole argument rests on the idea that fighting on the same side grants obligation. Thus the same obligation is due EE as is the USSR. It's a moral argument and not a very convincing one at that.
>perceveid ally? since when countries in EE were allied with ukraine? i think you forgot that warsaw pact doesn't exist anymore.
You all suffered under and fought against the same Soviet Union. Following your logic you have an obligation to defend them.
Your argument is entirely hypocritical. |
> she could have fallen unconscious during the event
At which point, it crosses the line from "yeah, super unethical because she's stumbling around and too drunk to consent" to "definitely, no question at all, definitely rape." If the person you're having sex with falls unconscious during the act, they are no longer a consenting partner. *What is difficult to understand about this*? | Or a synthetic diamond, sure. But at that point, there are a number of other significant problems. Like, do I really want to spend the rest of my life with someone so superficial she'd rather have me spend $5k on a shiny rock, rather than, say, a down payment on a house? |
> What if instead we reacted to criminal activity with compassion for the criminal, sought to understood why they committed the crime, and use the money that would have paid the flogger to redress their grievances?
If have acknowledged the important role of compassion, drug rehab and moral instruction. Your additional suggestion to give convicted criminals money??
| > A student on a college campus is presumably legal adults with the full bevy of rights and privileges afforded to any US citizen, including voting, free assembly, free speech, free press, and all of the other attendant rights that have been sufficient for lots of powerful progressive forces.
How do you think the expression of those rights manifests? How do you think "powerful progressive forces" operate? They protest, demonstrate, write op-eds and blog pieces. It seems from your OP that you feel that these protests are inappropriate because they seek to challenge the free speech of the person being protested.
So how are you suggesting that college students leverage their freedom of assembly, speech, and press to counter messages they find objectionable, other than the way that they currently tend to do it?
>Sure, but as a society, we're all better off for it having happened that way, rather than any view being silenced, aren't we?
That's precisely the question that's being debated.
* Are we better off or worse off as a society if we silenced the free speech of a terrorist cell as they came up with a plan to blow up the capitol building?
* Are we better or worse off as a society if we silence the free speech of your neighbor who turns on his megaphone every night to explain to you in great detail how he will break into your house and filet you?
* Are we better or worse off as a society if we silence the free speech of someone who wishes to lecture to elementary school children about how chattel slavery wasn't such a bad thing, and their teachers are lying to them during black history month?
* Are we better or worse off as a society if we silence the free speech of someone who starts a deadly stampede by falsely shouting "fire" in a crowded theatre?
Because if you think it's a good idea to silence any one of these examples, but don't think it's a good idea to tell <PERSON> to take a long walk down a short pier, then you have to answer the question: where's the line? What speech is acceptable if not all speech is? |
Subsets and Splits