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@Debunker
What about that so called genocide in Gaza?
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@Sidewalker
I really don't understand this idea everyone seems to have that moderation should be a democratic process
They pretend it is:
You can either look at the cake or you can eat it, but you can't have both.
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I vote: lol
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@Swagnarok
With an ongoing genocide (assuming that there obviously is one), I could see genocide denial as being a roundabout way of arguing that no action should be taken to stop the genocide, which is a roundabout way of arguing in favor of the genocide.
That's also nonsense.
Look at the number of people who believe Karmelo Anthony is a murderer vs those who don't.
You going to ban everyone who says he isn't because that is a round about way to argue in favor of murder?
Censorship of arguments is a slippery slope because the basic premise of censorship (of arguments) is that the judge knows the truth. The true facts or the true ethics.
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@LucyStarfire
Of course it is...
You know what else? I read the poem before that movie came out. (Tolkein's translation)
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@Skipper_Sr
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@LucyStarfire
That may be true, but I want to make sure you understand that unless you take special steps your search results will be tailored to your browsing history. If you didn't take those steps or use other analytics to confirm this means nothing, and that's true for other regular visitors to this site.If you search on YouTube "Debate Site", the first search result will be Debate Art channel.
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Previously I have said that there are zoosexuals who identify as christian. I consider this part of the enduring pattern of religion, the capacity for twisting anything or cherry picking out a preferred interpretation.
Since it is not based in reason or the real agenda of a real god there is nothing to keep it coherent and consistent; nothing but the culture of followers which (as I am pointing out) is nearly as unreliable as the average individual.
Since it seems many of the people currently active on DART are going through some kind of phase where they think blind orthodoxy is cool (even 'masculine' I fear), and wish to cast everything in the light of 'strict dogma', I thought I would repost a selected exchange I found on a zoosexual forum recently. These are not my words:
[Fragcat] I know that the old testament does forbid bestiality, which even then bestiality is far different then me loving my dogs and sex simply being a part of that but the new testament doesn't mention it specifically and I have been told that as having sex with dogs is a form of love, that it is completely natural, ethical and allowed as far as Christianity goes since your just loving gods creations (animals).Is this true?
[dogluver101] My little look up (may be with Venice AI) shows it doesn't mention nothing about the New Testament. Just adultery, men on men, theives, etc will not inherit the kingdom of God.
[Soapguy] I know 99.9% of Christians would think beastiality a terrible sin, and they would be disgusted by it. But as I've gotten older, I just think of it as appreciating God's creation. I'm not really a practicing Christian but I was raised that way, so it's still ingrained in me to an extent.But when I see a beautiful dog or horse that's attractive to me, I don't have a problem thinking "look at this beautiful creature God made." And I'm glad he did make them.As far as the actual scripture in the old testament, Leviticus if I recall, I think that was put there by men just as a way to punish people they thought were sick. Like "while we're writing this down, we might as well throw this in too." I mean there are other things it calls abominations, like eating shrimp, and pork I think?
[Soapguy] As far as the actual scripture in the old testament, Leviticus if I recall, I think that was put there by men just as a way to punish people they thought were sick. Like "while we're writing this down, we might as well throw this in too." I mean there are other things it calls abominations, like eating shrimp, and pork I think?[bc161] Yeah, these are some of the parts that get me. Like, some of those parts seem almost definitely in there because they're trying to protect people from getting sick, so I sense that there are other things in the bible like that. Maybe they're just thinking like, hey, maybe don't bang your sheep because people are gonna think you're a weirdo and it's nice to have friends homie.Again, I have no idea what I'm talking about so this is all from the gut.
My words:
Do I consider people who believe jesus is god and the savior of mankind to be real christians even if they think bestiality is fine?
Absolutely, because if cherry picking, deflecting, making excuses for, and ultimately ignoring scripture precluded one from being a christian, there would be no real christians.
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Itaque pergo solum Latine scribere.
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Just save time and vote, oh wait, those don't matter either.
All that matters is what David wants, why waste time and drama pretending otherwise?
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@MayCaesar
Even when there are strong financial motivators, people still treat something they plan to hold on to for years better than something that tomorrow someone else will hold. If I lease a car for 3 years, I obviously will take a better care for it than if I just borrow it from someone for one day - but I still will treat it much more poorly than I did if I planned to drive it for 20 years to come.
And yet car rental companies make a profit.
People will take care of rented property if the system to hold them accountable for abuse are effective and clear beforehand. If people have abused lime scooters, the error was in the fact that the lime investors and management underestimated the need to hold people accountable and/or reward them for responsible behavior.
An error in application, not theory.
That coffee maker at your office that everyone uses is going to be less precious to you than the coffee maker at your home, regardless of how much you care for your officemates.
No longer applicable to me, but I have worked in offices where the coffee maker was $5000.
What would not be worth it to have in my home, was worth it for so many coffee addicts in one place. There is efficiency in sharing where sharing is possible.
As it so happened when coffee makers are $5000 they tend to be glorious constructs of invincible stainless steel that are nearly impossible to damage or incidentally abuse.
If the choice is between a very robust and reliable machine that is shared with strong financial motivators for responsible use, and everyone having an easily broken or unreliable machine, I choose the former and I think most people would as well.
It does require reliable and efficient civil courts of course, and that is not something anyone has had recently.
if you are a sole owner of the company, you will have much more stake in its success, than if you are just one of a hundred shareholders.
and yet the first thing everyone who wants to start a company does is limit their liability.
Owners are like everyone else, they want to maximize profit and minimize risk.
Owner/employees combine the interests of investment and wage and that is an improvement. I do not believe that the benefit of highly motivating a few individuals at the top of the management hierarchy is superior in terms of productivity to somewhat improving the motivations of all employees.
I think when it has been tried in the past it failed because employees who tend to want this tend to be communists who started off with a flawed social theory, i.e. they thought rich people were evil and once they were gone everything would magically turn out fine.
Rational self-interest is the important part, not irrational self-interest.
Those workers ate their own company alive and hurt themselves in the long run, but 'investors' do the same thing intentionally in hostile takeover -> liquidation.
Internal chartered structures would be necessary to discourage the irrationality of the worker/shareholder and I think a constantly refined family of charters would outperform the current prevalent models.
We don't need any special use of force to run this experiment, just let people be free and we'll see. As it stands the giant parasite called "the deep state" "the establishment" "the military industrial complex" favors company structures that are easier to corrupt, so we cannot know that success in this environment is truly reflective of success in a free market.
Feeling of ownership of your work is crucial.
This is perhaps correct, but at the same time most projects are beyond the scope of the individual. What is then needed is a mechanism to formalize owning a part, owning a subproject, owning a subcomponent, owning a certain step in the process, etc...
I think this is orthogonal to who owns the company as an asset for the most part, but if there is interaction, it must be true that someone who owns part of the company feels more ownership than someone who doesn't (all else equal).
and there is no such thing as maximization of profits at the expense of the customer
There is such a thing as overpricing your product and it is more prevalent due to psychology than under-pricing. A company charter which corrects that psychological irrationality may lead to companies which are more competitive in the long run.
Profits reflect the value of the company to the market players
No, that is sales, or income.
What amongst the income constitutes profit depends on the perspective. If you're a worker, your profit is the wage, but in the classical view a worker's wage is a cost of production.
You could just as easily view self-investment as separate from profit, and storing the value in a bank for liquid flexibility as separate from profit as well.
I am pointing out that even if you are at the perfect price point, i.e. peak income where marginal cost = marginal revenue, that doesn't say anything about how the income is used except maybe that further investment is pointless.
As investment no longer becomes rational and the bank account of the company becomes sufficiently large to guarantee stability, the income left to be paid as wages and dividends increases.
There is no reason to believe that a company that has no shareholders but its own employees would be more likely to achieve this state or more likely to endure.
In other words, there is no need for remote shareholders in this picture. It is neither here nor there.
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@MayCaesar
The less close contact there is between people, the less deadly the epidemic.
That is false.
It takes one viral particle, one infected cell, to become sick. The infection grows until it is stopped.
It is not a toxin, dosage doesn't matter, it's a boolean. Infected or not. At least with doubling rates sufficiently high to be characterized as a pandemic.
Therefore whatever the 'contact level' is, if it enough to transmit a single viable virus or bacterium (if it be that time), that is just as deadly as making out.
A lockdown is an extreme form of quarantine.
No it isn't, its a useless mockery of quarantine.
Lock downs have curfews, they have exceptions, they have irrational rules and placebo nonsense. Lockdowns did not work because that is what they were.
Quarantine works because it is based on rational comprehension of the phenomenon.
In the most extreme case, where everyone is forced to spend a week without leaving their room, with carefully vetted government representatives bringing them food, the pandemic is guaranteed to die out
That is simply not what "lockdown" means to anyone who used the word "lockdown" between 2019 and 2025.
Some uninformed people may have called what they heard about in China a "lockdown" but it bears no resemblance to what was done in the rest of the world.
Furthermore they failed to contain the virus, their entire population was exposed, every liberty they violated was for nothing.
Why? The virus doesn't care how draconian you are on some people, if it there is a single excepted carrier it will spread and it did.
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@WyIted
There is no compromise with lies.
It's not love of that MEEP that makes me keep bringing this up, it's love of truth. The bastards keep pretending it doesn't exist after voting for it. If they had voted for a resolution that claims the moon is made of cheese and pretended they didn't, I would feel the same way and do the same thing.
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TL;DR: Allegations (only at this point) that CCP mass produced forged US driver's licenses to cheat in mail in-ballots 2020.
Evidence of coverup rather than fraud, which as I have said many times is interchangeable in duty-to-prove contexts like elections.
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@Mharman
Ok that does it, I'm making a copy paste for this.
A quote to set the mood:
“The rules are simple: they lie to us, we know they're lying, they know we know they're lying, but they keep lying to us, and we keep pretending to believe them.”
― Elena Gorokhova, A Mountain of Crumbs
The rules quoted here: https://www.debateart.com/forum/topics/12865/posts/526239
starting with "You may not use hateful, harassing, or obscene language or imagery in your username or avatar."
The link to the old CoC was never updated with the new rules. The current rules were often ignored, people continued to cite the repealed rules, including mods.
--I called this out and corrected people many times (this is just the highlights where I made whole threads):
--So has Wylted (again just a highlight):
--This is part of a pattern of MEEPs being ignored:
--In https://www.debateart.com/forum/topics/12761-code-of-conduct-interpretation (already linked above) whiteflame and Savant both acknowledge the change by trying to shoehorn a ban justification into the current rather than repealed CoC.
[Whiteflame] You can continue to be indignant and you can disagree.
Damn right I will continue to be indignant, this isn't a difference between a good logic and bad logic.
The gulf here is between honest people and dishonest people.
People with honor rock the boat when they see lies, even when they weren't the ones to tell them.
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@Mharman
This is already kinda stupid.
Fortunately it was already repealed.
Oh wait that has been erased from history. Continue with the make-believe.
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As Wylted just pointed out: You guys didn't care about the last one, and I doubt David or the future moderators will feel bound by this one.
There is more dignity in an open exercise of arbitrary power than a false facade of democracy and process.
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@Savant
That's hauntingly reminiscent. I think there are probably already enough to train an LLM on it.
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@Moozer325
For starters, you need to clarify what you mean by "immune person"
Someone whose immune system has recorded the antibodies required to destroy a certain contagion.
and getting a vaccine makes you more "immune".
How much more when applied to someone who has already recovered from an infection (i.e. has gained natural immunity)?
Is this additional level enough to so that no further people are infected?
I am not making assertions, I am finding experts and listening to their assertions.
You can't find experts without some degree of expertise. You can't find an expert on immunology when someone can say "an immune person doesn't exist" and you think "that makes perfect sense."
You may not know how to make a ceramic vase, but you if you also don't know what a fired glazed vase is supposed to be like, you can't even determine if a person is a good potter.
Expertise is a spectrum, and the only way to assess who is higher or lower is by using the knowledge you do have and evaluating arguments. That's WHY they teach everyone biology in high-school and why they should go on doing that forever. What they clearly aren't teaching is epistemology.
Every sapient being that has ever existed or will ever exist has the right to demand an argument before believing something. Experts exist, but trusting the experts is a demand that should never be made outside of specific time constrained contexts.
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@Moozer325
There is no such thing as an immune person.
Unconventional.
What do you suppose this book is about?
Also, was it written by experts?
Once again, this is all in my non-expert opinion.
Your ignorance is clear, what is not clear is this: Why do you think you or any other ignorant person should be making assertions about these they don't understand?
In ignorance, not only are you unable to judge evidence, make or understand arguments, but you're also unable to identify expertise.
The only thing you can do is compare titles and diplomas. Telling you that you're making the world worse by engaging with that as your only contribution was the point of this thread.
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@Moozer325
If someone is immune, by definition they cannot get the virus again.
Suppose you take a cell sample from the lungs of an immune person. You put it in a petri dish with a drop of solution containing X number of active viruses.
What will happen?
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@Moozer325
What is the reason to take a vaccine if you are already immune?You cannot be completely immune to a virus. Vaccines decrease the risk of you getting it and having by worse symptoms.
Are you claiming that there is an improvement to immunity by taking a vaccine after you are already immune?
If you refuse to learn the basics then I am and always will be an expert in comparison to you.I took high school bio.
That should be plenty.
Now, my assertion again:
Everyone who is immune contracts viruses again and again. Their immunity may or may not destroy the virus so quickly they do not feel symptoms and/or do not spread the virus to anyone else.
If you remember what they taught you in high school bio you should know enough to see why this is true.
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@Moozer325
What does this evidence you speak of have to say about the difference between natural immunity and vaccine immunity?The reason we have vaccines is to gain immunity in safe ways. Getting the actual virus is dangerous for your health, and can be fatal. Vaccines have much lower death and symptom rates. To use an analogy, if I wanted to take a self defense class, I would want the instructor to demonstrate everything slowly and use boxing gloves rather than actually mug me using brass knuckles. Both give me experience defending myself, but one is much more preferable.
What is the reason to take a vaccine if you are already immune?
This is basic biology. Do you understand basic biology?I'm not an expert. Can you show me one who supports your claim
If you refuse to learn the basics then I am and always will be an expert in comparison to you.
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@Moozer325
What does this evidence you speak of have to say about the difference between natural immunity and vaccine immunity?we have real comprehensive data showing that my experience was an outlier.
Everyone who is immune contracts viruses again and again. Their immunity may or may not destroy the virus so quickly they do not feel symptoms and/or do not spread the virus to anyone else.This is unsupported.
This is basic biology. Do you understand basic biology?
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@Moozer325
Becuase you can never be too careful.
Yes you can be too careful.
When you are violating people's liberty for no good reason, using 'caution' as an excuse, that is too careful.
I got the virus twice before I got my vaccine, and it was unpleasant enough that I didn’t want to get it again
If you believe the vaccine saved you from a third infection that is a claim without scientific merit.
So I don’t get the virus and spread it to those at risk
Yet those who took vaccines did spread it.
Everyone who is immune contracts viruses again and again. Their immunity may or may not destroy the virus so quickly they do not feel symptoms and/or do not spread the virus to anyone else.
The fact that you were reinfected (if that is a fact, you could have been looking at two different strains or two completely different viruses) would prove that the virus reproduces extremely quickly or that your immune response is weak.
In either case, the vaccine would not have improved anything.
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@sadolite
Personally democracy is most threatened when I don't have bose speakers in every room.
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@Moozer325
Even though I may not be at risk, I can still spread the virus to those who are at risk.
Why did they say that people with natural immunity (anyone who recovered) should take the vaccine?
Nobody says that.If you don't trust these sources because they're experts
They say they don't trust the sources, and then people like you say "but they're experts".
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@MayCaesar
This is likely to go terribly wrong.
The devil is in the details.
In general things go terribly wrong with the motivations are wrong. They are almost always wrong in current government structures, but there is no shortage of disasters in private enterprise.
Those disasters are not random acts of god, they can be traced to people who do not understand that personal financial motivators for all actors need to be intelligently designed.
The most basic premise "you pay me if I produce, if I don't produce you don't pay me" takes you very far, creates the invisible hand; but it's all to easy to stray beyond its protection in large organizations both public and private.
A good illustration is Lime Scooters: have you seen how people treat those, versus how they treat their own?
And yet renting and leasing is an ancient practice that has allowed utilization in many circumstances where it would otherwise be impossible.
Is the problem with the idea of renting or is it the fact that Lime didn't have a mechanism to motivate good treatment?
In other words, people who beat up lime scooters faced no financial consequences.
Unfortunately in some places the same is true of renting residential space, and those places turn into slums.
This is why large private corporations such as Google grow to become slow and unmanageable beasts
An excellent point. They grow in the soil of rational self-interest but do not understand how to use it within their own organization. That is very common.
I think that Harry Browne's model is optimal: people form temporary associations to achieve very particular goals, then part ways. Instead of having a large corporation in which almost everything is managed by a collective of managers or shareholders, to the extent to which it is possible, it is best to contract everything. Working on a large software project and need to build 100 different modules? Hire 100 different programmers to write one module with unit tests each, then hire a few to put all this together - pay them their dues, then say goodbye to them - and you have the final product without the burden of being accountable to countless individuals working for you or holding your assets.
Ideal organization models in theory are as varied as the modes of production and service.
As you noted with google, it is not who pays and owns the effort that matters; but what they are doing.
If functional organization models became well known, encoded in local constitutions, and the shareholders were a very large proportion of the body politic; then it would be de facto a public action.
That was what I was pointing out. I don't care about the difference between private and public ownership of a project. I don't care if the shareholders 100% overlap with workers and customers, in fact I think that is probably for the best.
People are afraid of what they call "greedy" search for unlimited profits, and while in many cases they are quite wrong about statistics I am certain that the invisible hand will still operate with capped profits and categorical limitations on shareholders.
People have a right to try and construct such organizations and I think they could work and they may be more efficient than a pure profit motive company for certain services and products.
I hope that is clear: Liberty is the moral imperative, quality of life (production per capita) is the practical imperative.
Profits or the demographics of owners/managers/employees/customers is incidental.
Profits or the demographics of owners/managers/employees/customers is incidental.
In the future, everything could work this way. People will own their lives and not have to contend with countless contracts they have to bind themselves by. And instead of collectively used enterprises such as Lime, there instead would be networks like Uber everywhere connecting service providers with service consumers, and project directors with private contractors.
The internet does allow for rapid development of peer to peer economics, it has for years although it has been slow to be utilized.
It also allows for more complicated central models as well.
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@thett3
Question: How in the F would anybody be able to compile that information without also having a list of fraudulent social security numbers/TINs?So illegals pay $96 billion in taxes across state, local, and federal.
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@yachilviveyachali
"the Jew"
Kinda suspicious making a race a direct object.
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@yachilviveyachali
When I see dogs, cats, and other animals I do not think sexual thoughts.
... Ok ...
The degenerate behaviors between humans are very bad too.
Sex is not degenerate.
Addiction is degenerate.
Lying is degenerate.
Apathy is degenerate.
Parasitism is degenerate.
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@yachilviveyachali
The idea that they are intended to reform is a very new one.
I think reform is implicit in the idea of temporary imprisonment and temporary exile.
Temporary exile is not new, not by a long shot.
It could be a game theory thing rather than a genuine hope of reform though, i.e. if you kill people for every crime, every one who is accused will fight to the death. Very easy for a society to spiral into anarchy that way.
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@yachilviveyachali
Isn't torture a better punishment?
No. To inflict pain when there is no hope of reform treads too far from civilization. Just as inflicting pain to gain pleasure does.
A person who is in prison is there to reform and to be an example to discourage others, to commit the worst of crimes while being given a chance is as sure a rejection as one can ever see. There is no point in wasting time and resources or risking release or escape.
I will not speculate on what you have and have not done with animals
I won't l confirm nor deny anything on that front so it probably saves time to refrain.
but I would say an animal may not be able to consent to sex with a human
There is a thread for that: https://www.debateart.com/forum/topics/7407/posts/524630
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@yachilviveyachali
I would say an animal may not be able to consent to sex with a human.
There is a joke among libertarians "but who will pay for the roads", it mocks the incessant naive argument they often encounter. As if they had not seen and defeated the argument ten thousand times.
"but what about consent" is the same for zoosexual apologists.
If you want to do this properly start with a definition of consent.
It is true some male dogs get carried away with human legs, arms, soft toys, and so on.
If you call it getting carried away does that make it less their choice?
They also get carried away when sticks are thrown, but fetch is not torture or slavery.
They want what they want and nothing is more straightforward than inferring that a creature consents to their own actions when no fear of pain or punishment was ever used to motivate those actions.
Does this mean they want to be the ones on the receiving end?
No, they would have to do something else to demonstrate that.
They all say animals cannot talk.
I have been greatly amused over the years by the number of people I've backed into a corner while debating bestiality whom chose to assert the existence of a secret language of animals that they use with each other but that humans could never learn or perceive.
In short they choose an Disney fantasy over admitting that their moral theory was incoherent.
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@yachilviveyachali
I have no doubt that people talk about rape in prison without thinking about rape in prison
One can hope, but the problem is rape does happen in prison.
"ur moma" jokes cease to be acceptable when the person in question (or any person) is actually having sex with your mother (or any particular person) and using that as a point of degradation for the purposes of inciting anger.
In most instances, it is no different from those who talk about the torture and murder of those they find abhorrent.
And if thousands of prisons turned a blind eye to torture and murder in their prisons?
Another thing I hate is dishonor. To do indirectly by making people under your power vulnerable and then doing nothing to stop it while claiming the virtue signal of being above it is dishonorable.
A nation that claims to be beyond torture that smugly allows torture is hypocritical.
A people that claim to tolerate no rape and yet that delights in it being done to those they find vile in prisons they control is hypocritical.
Those who say it to you think you are deviant and therefore deserve deviancy.
Rape (real, not role-play) isn't deviancy. It is an abhorrent crime. It is torture. And the mind that takes satisfaction in it reveals their own unchecked subconscious notions about the meaning of sex. Reveals sex is a tool of degradation and domination in the back of their mind.
The flaw being in the rape-delighter, their delight is not limited to certain classes of enemy. Eventually everyone will deserve it, and the OP details that.
It is a way to degrade, punish, and gain the upper hand.
Precisely. Thinking of sex that way (with real people in real situations) is sick.
Heterosexual men see men raping other men as a very horrible thing.
Rape is horrible. Rape as punishment is the worst form of rape.
Identical in terms of value to someone who gets pleasure by causing pain (to real victims.
It is what they imagine to be the worst kind of humiliation and punishment.
Well, not all "heterosexual men" but the sick fucks the OP is talking about; yes.
Another problem is the idea everyone gets raped in prison.
It is too common, as are prison murders. Even if it wasn't the people believe it is common and that is what the context of their sick fantasies must be judged by.
There is one context in which I support the death penalty without reservation: Heinous crime after you're already in prison.
You kill or rape someone in prison. That's the final strike. Just fucking end the perp. Bury them in a shallow grave. Spit on the grave, and walk away.
And the idea that they could get away with it as in there is no proof? That is a conscious choice of prison wardens, nothing else. If they put prisoners together without a guard (and these days 5 cameras) watching that is not a "shrug what can you do" situation.
When homosexual acts do occur in prison, they tend to be consensual.
That's got nothing to do with this issue, although that should be stopped as well. Prison is for punishment, not a homosexual orgy.
It is interesting you find this disgusting, yet believe your interest in animals is ok. None of us are perfect, are we?
Nobody is perfect, but my hatred of rape, dishonor, double standards, and hypocrisy are not on the list of my imperfections.
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@Greyparrot
Lockdowns arguably killed far more people because we artificially lengthened the mutation period for the virus.
It's possible that the immune response when synchronized will exterminate a virus.
With the old plagues: the world is big and it can ripple around it in waves such that by the time it comes back to a place it has changed enough to reinfect.
Even in our interconnected modern world, the flu keeps coming back, and I have heard it claimed that this is because there is a zoonotic reservoir. The same would likely be true of covid19 which did infect other mammals.
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@MayCaesar
Suppose someone does not think that Bill Gates is "worth" having billions of dollars - what implications does it have and what does it really mean?
Nothing given that Bill Gates doesn't service just one person.
People think that Bill Gate's product is worth $220. It's just that there are a million people who agree.
It means that Bill Gates isn't a thief. It means that it's a trade. It means he doesn't owe society anything for the privilege of being rich, he's rich because society owed him for all the windows licenses.
Switching back and forth between a finite set of customers and "society" is logically questionable, but it's also a fundamental tactic of tax apologists, so I play their game...
I realize that the government has to be funded somehow
I think going from "this needs to be paid for" to "This needs to be paid for by extortion" is the actual "big lie" of our civilization.
Consensual funding would cause a hundred secondary effects would would improve government efficiency for the exact same reason that competing companies are better than artificial monopolies for employees and customers.
That is why:
but I think that the role of the government should be significantly shrunk.
I am now ambivalent on that point.
While the government is operated in an evil impractical manner shrinking it is better, but it would never be small enough to be acceptable under those terms.
On the other hand if it operated morally and cunning structure (in the same ambitious spirit of the checks and balances of the US constitution) then it being larger would not necessarily be a bad thing.
I don't know what it could accomplish under such circumstances. There is the fundamental problem of definitions. Right now the idea of "public action" and "government" are synonymous, but a better definition of "government" might be "the people who you call when you need to threaten violence against an aggressor".
There is no reason for public action to be mixed with violence. Every social safety net and non-violent public service could be a chartered corporation, the charter following basic requirements agreed to in a constitution (the social contract).
As long as it works, collective public action can grow to 99% of the economy for all I care.
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@Lemming
Lockdown was the forced face masks and distancing, right?
Well their rules were all over the place and their rational connection to science was highly varied.
The most common form of lockdown was the forced closure of what was deemed "non essential" storefronts.
This was in many places combined with orders for employees to not even go to work in "non essential" locations whether they served the public or not.
Masks and social distancing were not typically enforced through the arbitrary power over companies and not the public directly. i.e. you walk down the sidewalk without a mask, some thug cop would likely go after you but they were afraid to test an arrest like that in the courts.
What they were totally comfortable doing (because local petty regulators have unlimited power and have for a long time) is telling businesses that if they didn't enforce masks and social distancing they would be shut down.
There are tons of details to get into, but let me sum it up: A lockdowns are half measures that will fail to contain a highly contagious virus as a matter of ironclad scientific fact.
It doesn't matter how particularly absurd any particular rule or implementation was. None of them had a chance of succeeding. Viruses don't care what we call 'essential', they don't care about what time of the day it is (curfews), they don't care about the difference between BLM protests and churches.
If it's morally justified to keep people 6 feet away, it's morally justified to keep them 300 meters apart. The difference is that the virus is actually contained in the later scenario. The disruption is heavy but brief.
Quarantine, would be forcing an individual to not leave their house or city?
Yes, you draw a line along a natural border you can enforce and nobody crosses it until the populations on both sides have defeated the virus or died trying.
You have several layers of quarantine geography planned for rapid execution and when one zone is contaminated you subdivide. So first you make your whole country a zone. Nobody goes in, nobody goes out (except when they can be accurately cleared of the disease in the equivalent of an airlock or if they had been traveling between nations for so long that it counted as quarantine). More than one island nation had a decent chance of pulling this off but ultimately they failed, why? Exceptions.
Once there are cases in the US, you shut down domestic interstate travel. Inside infected states you quarantine cities. In cities neighborhoods.
After it becomes clear that two or more zones are clear, i.e. they were not infected, they can be allowed to commune with each other again. You are left with a sick zone where the people have to ride it out for six weeks.
This may not work, but when a virus is so contagious and the incubation period is so long as to make all that a useless gesture, then anything short is STILL unjustified because it is even more sure that it will not make a meaningful difference.
Could required handwashing be considered a lockdown of sorts?
If you want to confuse the issue, sure.
Hand washing and cleaning in general isn't just about stopping one disease, it combats thousands. Many of them being far less infectious or airborne.
For example you clean your hands in the food industry not just for the flu but also for salmonella. salmonella can absolutely be suppressed by a combination of thoroughly cooking food and cleaning surfaces. Flu cannot (and has not every single time a new variant appears for all recorded history).
Such doesn't completely 'prevent disease spread, but is there no value in 'decreasing spread speed and chance?
It doesn't reduce the chance unless the disease is contained. I just mentioned salmonella. Salmonella is contained, our protocol has essentially eliminated it from people's normal contact.
It can't even be found on most farms (at least the dangerous strains).
There are differential equations that describe growth and contagions and depending on various factors such as incubation time and time before an individual is no longer infectious a slow enough speed of spread WILL kill the disease, i.e. it dies out faster than it can find new hosts.
In a simplistic example if everyone lived on homesteads that are 10 km from each other and a disease is defeated in 10 minutes it will not spread because you can't walk 10 km in 10 minutes. In that case preventing people from using a car slows the spread but also reduces the absolute exposure. It is a practical quarantine.
Other diseases, like HIV, never stop being infectious (naturally). There is no "slowing down" that will eradicate it, total abstinence is required for the infected individuals and that is in the context of HIV a quarantine.
'Decreasing speed' that is not also 'decrease absolute exposure percentage' is in my opinion pointless. People should be free to try, but there is no way I would agree to a social contract where panicked unaccountable government officials at every level can declare that an excuse to do anything with no repercussions.
. . . Hm, maybe Covid was 'too easily spread for it to matter?But then the common cold is easily spread, but people find value in facemasks and handwashing.
A careful individual can get through flu season without catching it. A population cannot. Not unless they quarantine every year.
I work remotely these days and every time I caught a virus like flu, cold, covid, it was always through my nephews. They go to school. They get it. They come home, give it to everyone, and when I meet my family (in their various houses) I get it.
That's how contagion works. If I am 'careful' 99% of the time I will still get infected by that 1% connection.
I am not a zealot on the efficacy of masking one way or the other, but I will point out two things:
1.) Just because a lot of people do it, does not mean it's working.
2.) Just because the government tells you to do it, does not mean it works.
The reason surgeons started wearing masks is infinitely more sensible: don't spit in the patients open body. And that's about bacteria, not viruses.
As a spit preventer, masks are great, but they protect other people from you, not you from other people. Wearing a mask and going into a bar full of people who aren't doesn't protect yourself, their spit gets all over you, you touch yourself, you touch your food, you're infected.
I am absolutely sure that the vast majority of people thought masks protected their person.
Government was still working on vaccine and waiting for disease to run it's course then, as reasons for temporary lockdown?
Only if selling a vaccine was more important than economic production, liberty, and faith in institutions.
A.) They did not develop the vaccine in time, they knew they wouldn't, the only reason they even get to claim the vaccines did anything was because they claimed every new variant was a continuation of the pandemic.
B.) If it takes them 14 months to develop a vaccine, and it takes 3 months of lock-down to equal the economic damage of 1.5 months of quarantine, then what was the point? If quarantine had been enacted the virus would have been defeated long before the first vaccine appeared. There would be no variants of covid because there would be no more covid 19.
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@Double_R
Your ability to gish gallop is irrelevant.
If I were to grant that you were right and Trump is wrong simply because you have the gall to gaslight to the very end and I don't gaslight at all, that would mean people like you win the culture war.
That is why I will consciously not give a shit when Trump twists the law and says absurd things.
This is the respect for the law that people like you have earned. Enjoy.
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@Double_R
You never let "paying your lawyer with your own money" penetrate your skull.Read that last paragraph as many times as needed to make it stick.
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@zedvictor4
Surprised it took this long.
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@zedvictor4
I know some things he won't say:
All this time I was telling you to do stuff via prophets like adaptable ratman and you wouldn't listen!
At worst it would be like "Don't you love puzzles? I love puzzles. I hid the solution in the bible and you dullards never got it. Boring."
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@n8nrgim
If the idea was to pay them to make the problem go away, pay them in solar panels. Still not fair, but at least the only thing they can use them for are what they claim to want.
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@MayCaesar
It is not obvious to me at all.It is obvious that lockdowns save lives when a massive deadly epidemic is abound
Quarantine is sometimes practically justified.
Everything that distinguishes "lockdown" from "quarantine" is exactly what makes "lockdown" utterly useless and therefore impossible to justify.
It's like amputating a limb beyond the point of septic infection. You lose a limb, and you still don't stop the infection. The worst of both worlds.
The only way for "lockdown" to be rational is if the goal was not saving lives but prolonging disruption and crisis.
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@Greyparrot
Nothing more fascist then sending people back to their country of origin.
I heard that's just what the nazis did. Tours stopped in their tracks. Thousand of Canadians doomed to return to Canada to face polar bears and hockey pucks to the jaw.
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There is no such thing as a level that is suable by the likes of you.[AdaptableRatman] Eventually as a just in case it is needed to know who to prosecute if any mod uses their powers to ruin the site to a level thats sueable
I shouldn't be surprised coming from the legal insight that came up with "ban controversial topics or else the site is criminally liable"
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