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@ebuc
Our understanding of how gravity works isn't what's holding us back from 'controlling' it. In fact, it's incredibly simple to manipulate gravity. All you have to do is move massive objects around. Unfortunately, while this is simple in principle, it is incredibly difficult to execute, given that objects with sizable gravitational effects also have incredibly high inertia as a given property of their mass.
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@Polytheist-Witch
Religious texts are there to explain how God or gods relate to man. Whatever examples they gave to early man to try to explain how things work may or may not be accurate. You also have people writing down whatever visions they saw, in ways they understand it. It is not meant to be a science book, it is not meant to be fact, it is myth. It is stories related from the gods to men to be interpreted by the men that it was given to and then those stories have been passed on verbally and eventually written down. Each time the story is told it is accepted by the person and process the way that person understands it. I really wish you people would quit acting like somebody wrote a religious test thinking it was going to be used as a science book in a school later, that is not how it worked, that's never how it's worked. If you're an atheist and you don't believe in any religion I don't understand why you're even here talking about it, it means nothing to you. We get it you don't believe in any gods, you don't believe any religious text in any way shape or form, you're just here to fucking harass believers.
2 Peter 1:20-21
20 Above all, you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet’s own interpretation of things. 21 For prophecy never had its origin in the human will, but prophets, though human, spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.
Proverbs 30:5-6
“Every word of God is flawless;he is a shield to those who take refuge in him.6 Do not add to his words,or he will rebuke you and prove you a liar.
2 Timothy 3:16
16 All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness,
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@Sidewalker
I see, so you reject competing religions because they are not infallible about what science will learn in the future?I've noticed that the Bible isn't a very good cookbook either, maybe that would be another way your religion could deny competing faiths, I mean, the God that forgot to tell everyone about the Copernican Revolution for three thousand years could have at least provided us with some really good recipes, you should definately reject a God that can't cook.
Once again, I do not fault a text that leaves out details unimportant to its purpose. But God didn't "forget to tell everyone about the Copernican Revolution," he straight up lied about how the solar system works. This same God is supposed to be omniscient, so it isn't just an honest mistake, he literally created the solar system.
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@Sidewalker
you believe it is invalid as a religious text because you think God should have told the authors about the Copernican Revolution 3000 years before it happened?
No, I believe it is invalid as a religious text because it lies. It doesn't need to bring up the structure of the solar system, but if it does, then it has to get it right.
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@RationalMadman
It's just a dumb joke, not something I actually believe.
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@YouFound_Lxam
there has to be origin, because something can't just come out of nothing
So where does God come from? It makes just as much sense for the universe to be eternal and without cause as for God to be eternal and without cause.
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The penis is round. The vagina is a slit. The anus is round.
Clearly the penis was made for anal penetration.
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@Sidewalker
science believed that the sun orbited the earth until the Copernican revolution less than 500 years ago, does that invalidate science also?
No. Science is explicitly based upon a presumption of imperfect knowledge being improved over time, whereas God is supposed to be eternal with perfect knowledge.
your commitment to materialism is a form of metaphysics
Materialism: philosophy
the doctrine that nothing exists except matter and its movements and modifications.
At no point did I assert that I believe this. I have made no claims on the existence of souls or other supernatural/nonmaterialistic phenomena. Technically, I haven't even made the claim that there is no God. Just because FoundLxam's arguments are bad doesn't mean that there aren't good arguments in favor of theism. I will say that I firmly believe that the Bible is so contradictory and inconsistent as to be useless as a theological or metaphysical text, much less as a source for empirical claims.
your second implied assertion, that the scientific method is the only reliable path to knowledge is a matter of epistemology.
No. I never implied this. When you burn your hand on the stove as a child, you don't go 'I hypothesize that touching it again would burn me again'. You just don't touch it anymore. But this is still empirical. The scientific method is just a formalized way of investigating reality with empirical observations, but it is far from necessary.
Obviously, you can't make empirical observations on metaphysics, since they aren't physical. That doesn't mean that no truth exists in metaphysics, we are able to use syllogisms and other forms of reasoning to draw conclusions about these things.
I ascribe to rationalism, not 'scientism,' by the way. And it's a philosophy, not a religion.
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@YouFound_Lxam
Don't take everything in the bible literally.
Then why should I take any of it literally?
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@YouFound_Lxam
Well actually there is your fatal flaw. God doesn't want us to worship him.
hmmm
Exodus 20
And God spoke all these words:2 “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.
3 “You shall have no other gods before[a] me.
4 “You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. 5 You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, 6 but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.
Matthew 4:10
Jesus said to him, “Away from me, Satan! For it is written: ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only.’”
Deuteronomy 6
13 Fear the Lord your God, serve him only and take your oaths in his name. 14 Do not follow other gods, the gods of the peoples around you; 15 for the Lord your God, who is among you, is a jealous God and his anger will burn against you, and he will destroy you from the face of the land. 16 Do not put the Lord your God to the test as you did at Massah. 17 Be sure to keep the commands of the Lord your God and the stipulations and decrees he has given you. 18 Do what is right and good in the Lord’s sight, so that it may go well with you and you may go in and take over the good land the Lord promised on oath to your ancestors, 19 thrusting out all your enemies before you, as the Lord said.
Those are the words of someone who only wants love?
He doesn't send people to hell
sure.
2 Peter 2:4
God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell
Luke 12
4 And I say unto you my friends, Be not afraid of them that kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do.
5 But I will forewarn you whom ye shall fear: Fear him, which after he hath killed hath power to cast into hell; yea, I say unto you, Fear him.
The Bible is very against the idea of free will in places.
Exodus 9:12
And the Lord hardened the heart of Pharaoh, and he hearkened not unto them
Ecclesiastes 7:13
Consider the work of God: for who can make that straight, which he hath made crooked?
Ephesians 1:5
Having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to himself, according to the good pleasure of his will,
Acts 13:48
And when the Gentiles heard this, they were glad, and glorified the word of the Lord: and as many as were ordained to eternal life believed.
Romans 9
15 For he saith to Moses, I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.16 So then it is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that sheweth mercy.
2 Timothy 1:9
Who hath saved us, and called us with an holy calling, not according to our works, but according to his own purpose and grace, which was given us in Christ Jesus before the world began,
2 Thessalonians 2
11 And for this reason God will send them strong delusion, that they should believe the lie, 12 that they all may be condemned who did not believe the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness.13 But we are bound to give thanks to God always for you, brethren beloved by the Lord, because God from the beginning chose you for salvation through sanctification by the Spirit and belief in the truth,
Revelations 13:8
All inhabitants of the earth will worship the beast—all whose names have not been written in the Lamb’s book of life, the Lamb who was slain from the creation of the world.
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@Sidewalker
what is the basis of your belief that the Bible is a science book
If by 'science book' you mean a book that makes claims about reality, with specific subfields such as astronomy, biology, etc., then the Bible is unequivocally a science book. If you mean a book that makes claims about reality based upon scientific inquiry, then not so much, though 1 Kings 18:18-39 does qualify as a type of empirical experiment (Elijah ruins the controlled variables by pouring water on his sacrifice though).
The term 'science book' is yours though, I'm just saying that the Bible gets some pretty basic stuff wrong. I could literally check the flying insect claim with five minutes and a fly swatter. More importantly though, the Bible should be able to get stuff that isn't easily checkable right. God should know that the earth orbits the sun, for instance. Yet it reads
He set the earth on its foundations; it can never be moved. Psalms 104:5 NIV
is that a principle of your faith perhaps?
I don't have a faith.
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@YouFound_Lxam
Yes, it would be huge.... your point?
If God wants people to worship Him so bad, it would be trivial to include this information. The fact that the Bible is so often wrong on both historical and scientific claims is very strong evidence that it's NOT the word of God.
But even science sometimes can't show its work or prove things.
Science gets stuff wrong. It's called trial and error. But when Einstein's theory of relativity replaced Newtonian physics as the consensus held theory, it was because Newton's work was fruitless or bad, just incomplete. You plug in a relative speed of zero into Einstein's equations and you get Newton's. But there's a difference between, 'hey, Newton's formulas aren't super accurate 100% of the time like we thought,' and, 'flying insects have 4 legs.'
Even worse, because it's in the Bible, the holy Word of God, you aren't allowed to question it when your religion says the earth is only six thousand years old. Science on the other hand, is always striving for better answers, updating with new information. There's no loyalty to Newton, or Einstein. A three year old could write a new theory and if the math checked out and answered more questions than Einstein's, they would replace it. A line in my bio says, 'Be faithless to your cause and betray it to a stronger enemy.' This is the same stance I try to take in all of my debates. I want to hold true beliefs more than I want to win arguments.
BTW I'm not blocking you, so you'll get faster responses if you tag me back.
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@YouFound_Lxam
Here's the thing about scripture. If the Bible had called, thousands of years in advance of science, stuff that no other religion claimed, it would be HUGE. Like if Genesis said, 'Hey, there are 8 planets. Two are closer to the sun than Earth is, and two of them are so far away you can't even see them yet.' And then when telescopes were invented we were able to look and be like, 'yep, there they are.' You would have to believe that the Bible was either the word of God, aliens, or some advanced human civilization lost to time, like Atlantis.
That's what science does, except it has to show it's work.
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@YouFound_Lxam
And as far as bad sexual decisions, there are very cheap and easy ways to use protection while having sex.Condoms are a big example of this.
Christians/Pro-lifers oppose birth control all the fucking time.
God kills a guy for not cumming in his brother's wife. https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+38%3A8-10&version=ESV
The Hobby Lobby case was about whether 'Christian values' of the company owner should affect healthcare policies on birth control for their employees.
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@YouFound_Lxam
1: The Singularity...I just want to point out that I do agree with science, and in fact it does prove gods' existence....The big bang defiantly did happen, but God is the one who ignited the match.
This is in direct contradiction to Christian etiological scripture.
2: Design Has to Have a Designer
First, read this. Then, if you feel like it, read my paragraph. Yudkowsky is smarter and more eloquent than I am.
...If you have all the parts of a watch in a box, and they aren't put together, you could shake that box forever, but you would never get a watch. Now the human brain for example is way more advanced than a watch, so do you really think that life was just created like that, all shaken up?
And you would never get a human from shaking a box of organs. This is a terrible analogy. Evolution doesn't work with a box of parts. On the most fundamental level, it uses DNA replication as a filter for successful strategies. While this method has produced incredible results, it's hardly what I would call "intelligent." Think of how a computer programmer writes code. If a line fails, they can tweak parameters or try different stuff until it works. If necessary, he can remove entire sections of code and replace them with cleaner, more efficient code. With time and innovation, he can create new programs that do things no program has done before.
By comparison, evolution is the worst computer programmer you have ever seen. There is no backspace on his keyboard. He cannot make large changes all at once. Every single line change has to be iterated as its own generation, and if it does worse than the parent code, it gets thrown away.
3. What Created Life?...every biological experiment we have done with chemicals and elements, has not produced life or any actual signs of life at all.So, if life didn't arise from non-living chemicals, then how did life arise? The only explanation is a supernatural being.
1. Scientists have created amino acids (life/DNA's most basic building blocks) from inorganic compounds in conditions thought to resemble early earth's oceans. [1]
2. You claim to believe that the Big Bang happened, surely you also prescribe to the Earth being 4.5 billion years old, and that fossil records put the first life at ~3.5bya. So random chance had literally a billion years to create life from nothing, and because we haven't replicated that within 200 years of the theory of evolution being published, it must be impossible?
4. Moral LawIf some things are objectively morally wrong, and some things are objectively morally right, then there must be a God.
1. You made no argument in favor of objective morality
2. How does it follow that there is a God? you could posit that it's a fundamental law, like gravity.
5. Human ReasoningWe humans have the nature to reason, and to wonder why things exist, why we exist, and that's why we have science. Why are we the only species that does this? Animals don't wonder why they exist, they just do? What gave us that need to find out? God did that's who.
You took a philosophical question, 'why can only humans reason' and then said, because God made it that way. I could literally say that in ANY POSSIBLE UNIVERSE. Imagine a world where every animal can reason. You regularly have debates on politics with the squirrel in your backyard. One could then pose the philosophical question, 'how do all of these animals reason' and answer the same, 'because God made it that way.'
Animals don't wonder why they exist, they just do?
We don't know because we can't ask them.
Fatal Flaw
You claim to believe in and argue for the existence not only of a God, but specifically the Christian god Yahweh/Jehovah, yet you only made theism arguments, not Christianity arguments. Every single one of your arguments is equally valid for Allah or Zeus or Quetzalcoatl. Furthermore, your professed belief in certain scientific theories are directly opposed to the Christian creation myth.
This is why there are so many agnostics and spiritual types that don't profess a specific religion. They look at part of the universe they're confused by like the Big Bang and evolution and conclude that some higher Power must be behind it. Unfortunately, there's no evidence on whether this Power wants to be worshipped, much less how it wants to be worshiped. They might read different scriptures, trying to find one with a hint of Truth, something that holds that same awe and answers their questions, but there are hundreds of religions, and most have fundamental disagreements, and many also contradict what you already know, like how the Bible says flying insects have four legs. (Lev 11:20-23)
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Theoretically, if novice was banned today, would his elo still update in five days? Never really paid attention to that.
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@YouFound_Lxam
humans have been believing
that's culture, not biology. Word your arguments better.
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@ebuc
While volcanoes and especially "super-eruptions" can have drastic effects on global weather patterns, I don't think they are sufficient to pose an existential risk, with little-to-no chance of human survival. Mass starving as crop yields drop, harsh winters, a corresponding hit to the economy, yes, but not extinction.
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@Mharman
You're missing the point that there's no difference other than the idea of a dedicated physical device for a single program that the computer you carry in your pocket can already do along with thousands of other tasks.
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Commonly posed existential risks applicable to the next 200 years
1. AI/Singularity
2. Climate change
3. Nuclear apocalypse
4. Outside risks (i.e., aliens)
5. Disease, especially engineered
It's up for debate how much we can do about 2.
1. and 3. are easy in theory; don't build AIs or Nukes. Unfortunately international conflicts incentivize defection because of the advantages afforded by development of the same.
4. is similar to 1. By the time we realize it's a problem, there will likely be nothing we can do about them.
Others risks
nanobots: essentially the Grey goo hypothesis mentioned by Wylted, but it doesn't really require any intelligence behind it, so I count this separate from AI as it could happen independently.
other outside risks:
* type 1, one's we can potentially manage, such as a meteor crash course
* type 2, ones we can't, i.e nearby supernovas
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@YouFound_Lxam
Just because a culture has existed, doesn't make it the right way to live.
why should everyone else around act as if they are a different person and go against what humans have been believing for thousands of years.
You can see why you're a hypocrite for saying both of these things, right?
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I would want it allocated better than by level.
Main categories I see:
Infrastructure- power, road maintenance, sewage, etc.
Law enforcement- Police, Courts, FBI, etc.
National Security- Foreign intelligence, military
Science/Medicine- NASA, NIH, etc
Safety- OSHA, FDA (has some overlap with law enforcement)
Legislation/Administration- Congress, mayors, etc.
Basic stuff- paying gov employees, maintenance of buildings, PR, etc.
I'm probably missing a few, but basically, if I never travel on the highway, then my tax dollars shouldn't pay for the highway. And you could probably manage a lot more, especially on the local level, by fees rather than taxes. Put a toll booth before every highway on ramp.
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@Lemming
Stuff like an instant abs or instant boobs pill is probably not actually physically viable.
I suspect that eventually VR will get so good, especially after including other senses; touch, smell, sexual pleasure, that people will choose to be plugged into that most of the time. We called 2016 the dawn of the "post-truth" era, but it would take on a whole other meaning if one can pose as a body builder with a thought, or give themselves tails or scales or gills or penises. Personally, I value self-expression more than whether someone's appearance matches their genetics or life experiences. Someone who has had children shouldn't have to bear the literal scars of that, especially if most potential partners find them unattractive. I have stretch marks myself, from a growth spurt in middle school, but there's nothing about those that matter to me. They are blemishes on a canvas that only I should be able to paint.
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Programs like WolframAlpha, Desmos, the Google calculator feature, etc., ARE CALCULATORS. I generally use these more than a dedicated physical calculator, especially in online coursework, but there are certain advantages to being able to access advanced functions anywhere, without wifi or power. It's like saying, "can Kindle replace books?" People aren't going to stop reading novels because of Kindles, even if paper sales decrease (and even stop someday?) as they gain in popularity.
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In an ideal world where gender-affirming therapy doesn't have any irreversible effects, I would say it doesn't matter. Unfortunately we live in a world where hormone blockers and the like often have not only irreversible effects but often strictly negative effects (i.e., never going through puberty at all as opposed to going through a testosterone or estrogen based puberty.)
To me, your body should be as easily changed as your clothes. If you're feeling moody, you wear black, if you're feeling feminine, you get some boobs. Of course this is infeasible to current technology, but one can look to the future and hope.
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@YouFound_Lxam
I never said social constructs don't exist, I said that how can someone say gender is a social construct, but then also say that people can identify with their preferred gender.You could say that gender is a social construct, but you could also say that money is a social construct as well. Should we just stop using money? The whole point we created money is to make trade easier. Same with gender. We created gender, so that we can make identifying a biological male as a man, and a biological female as a woman.Now this doesn't mean people shouldn't have the right to identify as they want to, I think that that would be against the U.S. first amendment, but if someone choses to identify as such, why should everyone else around act as if they are a different person and go against what humans have been believing for thousands of years.That would be like if someone said they were going to stop using money as currency, and just use items for trade. They could still function in society, but you can't expect everyone to immediately go and switch with them.
how can someone say gender is a social construct, but then also say that people can identify with their preferred gender.
When I say that gender is a social construct, I mean that it isn't an inherent part of biology, but rooted in culture and psychology. When culture changes, gender norms and definitions can as well.
Gender is a two-way street. One is identity, how one feels they fit gender roles and how they choose to express it. The other is how others interpret their gender expression and how they respond (i.e., using their preferred pronouns).
Another example of how your identity can affect a socially constructed role is the cliques in school. If I identify as a jock, I will likely join a sport, wear athletic clothing, and generally hang out with other jocks. There isn't a physical characteristic that definitively makes me a jock or not, it depends on how I express myself and how others respond. This same "jock" we just described might also be an honors student taking advanced math courses and earning college credit over the summer. I knew several kids in high school who would normally fit more the "geek" stereotype, but they also took part in sports and had friends in both cliques.
you could also say that money is a social construct as well. Should we just stop using money?
No. I never advocated for abolishing gender (though some do).
We created gender, so that we can make identifying a biological male as a man, and a biological female as a woman.
First, it would be inaccurate to say that we "created" gender in the same way that we created money, to compare to a previous example. Gender likely naturally arose from the jobs that each biological sex was suited for: men to physically demanding tasks like hunting and war, and women to child-rearing. Today, there is much less need for such a distinction. A woman can drive a semi or do accounting just as easily as a man, there is little to no physical hindrance to women in most careers.
Second, saying that gender is necessary to distinguish biological males and females is false. The need to identify these is exclusive to the act of reproduction. Anyone you're intending to have sex with should be happy to disclose what genitalia they have, but you don't ever need to know if the person you pass on the street has a penis or a vagina.
why should everyone else around act as if they are a different person and go against what humans have been believing for thousands of years.
Again, third gender cultures are historical evidence that humans are 1. perfectly capable of this, and 2. that calling it "what humans
have been believing for thousands of years." is simply not true.
I agree about freedom of speech. If you don't want to call someone he or she because you think they don't match your perception of what those mean, no one should force you to. Just don't be surprised if that person doesn't want to spend time with you.
That would be like if someone said they were going to stop using money as currency, and just use items for trade. They could still function in society, but you can't expect everyone to immediately go and switch with them.
Trans people aren't asking for you to get rid of gender norms, just to accommodate theirs. If 1.5% of the population decided to pay people with goats or shells instead of cash, businesses would come up with a way to accommodate that, not give up on currency. Plenty of freelance and independent contractors will accept goods and services in exchange for their work already, so this isn't entirely farfetched.
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@foreigne48
Some humanists are egalitarians, why not be a humanist?
You say that like humanism and feminism are some how mutually exclusive. One can easily be both.
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@Best.Korea
It easily crushed its democratic neighbour.
The Peloponnesian War lasted for 27 years. It was not "easily" won. And the fact that Athens was a successful city-state at all points to Democracy being at least somewhat viable.
it gives much better odds to create the greatest military than any other system of government.
Spending the majority of your money on the military = stronger military?
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@Best.Korea
Sparta was constantly dealing with helot (slave) revolts, and while successful, definitely ranks below the conquests of Alexander the Great, the Mongol Empire, Rome, British Empire, etc.
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@YouFound_Lxam
We've only had two attacks on our own soil. 9/11 and Pearl Harbor.
False. If we start at the Declaration of Independence, then the Revolutionary War, War of 1812, Mexican American War, WWI, and WWII all had attacks on U.S. territory, though WWI was technically an naval attack off the coast of Massachusetts, so no "soil" in that one. There has also been the '93 World Trade center attack and the Pensacola shooting, in terms of foreign terrorism.
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@YouFound_Lxam
they say gender is a social construct, but how can someone identify as a gender and also say gender doesn't exist?
Social constructs exist. The distinction is that they are determined by humans and human behavior. The modern conception of the teenager is less than a hundred years old. [1] By contrast, third gender cultures have existed for hundreds of years. Saying that a gender is "invalid" or "not real" because it doesn't correspond to one of two biological sexes (which is itself ignorant of several chromosomal/other intersex disorders) is just as arbitrary as saying one is a "teenager" at 13-18 and therefore must meet teenager stereotypes.
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I have spoken to people who claim to have had interactions with spirits or entities from "beyond the veil," and multiple religions tout some sort of afterlife, often with a packaged threat of eternal suffering if you don't follow theirs. Some people have even had near death experiences that claim to have seen it.
As far as I can tell though, consciousness is a physical phenomenon that takes place mostly in the brain. Destroy the brain, destroy the consciousness. I am optimistic that progress in medical technology will someday extend the human lifespan to the point of practical immortality, but am not so sure it will happen before I die. There are other possibilities, such as cryonics, that might give me specifically a chance.
That being said, I don't really want to spend my finite time in this life worrying whether or not there is a next. If there is, and I meet the criterion for exaltation, great. But I'm operating under my morals until I get a better sign. And if there is nothing after this, I will die knowing I upheld my own ideals, and met it on my terms as best as I could.
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As a resident of Idaho I feel obligated to say that potato wedges are always appropriate and appreciated.
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The Litany of Gendlin:
What is true is already so.
Owning up to it doesn't make it worse.
Not being open about it doesn't make it go away.
And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with.
Anything untrue isn't there to be lived.
People can stand what is true,
for they are already enduring it.
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@Best.Korea
@Vici
You don't know what /s means.
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@RationalMadman
I'm not opposed to the content, just making sure I understood the decision correctly. I tend to misunderstand socially motivated decisions more often than others.
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there is no way to be absolutely certain whether a statement regarding reality is accurate. So when one calls something an objective fact, they are merely stating their personal belief. That belief can be analyzed as nothing more than that, so in the course of having a rational dialog between two individuals who do not agree on reality we have to think in terms of how we got to our beliefs rather than just asserting them.
I agree.
Something I have been meaning to introduce to the site is the Double Crux method. Essentially, any time you disagree on a belief, you and the person you disagree with should find the crucial belief that informs your disagreement, one that would change your mind on the initial point of contention.
Perhaps we disagree on whether swimming in a lake is safe. A crux for each of us is the presence of crocodiles in water: I believe there aren't, you believe there are. Either of us would change our mind about the safety if we were persuaded about this crux.
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@RationalMadman
Is USM to avoid being characterized as a call-out thread? It seems supremely obvious who this is addressed to.
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@Best.Korea
just like I hate South Korean dictatorship and Japanese hentai.
The politics I can forgive, but hating Hentai? Unacceptable!
/s
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@bibliobibulimaniac
Generally speaking arguments about how intent affects the morality of an action has more to do with the intended action, not the motivation/philosophy behind it.
For instance, manslaughter is less morally bad than murder. The case of manslaughter has no intent to kill anyone.
The scenario in #1 gives both parties the intent to kill 100 Jews. Without precise motivations given, it is impossible to compare the two individuals any further. If we assume that the second person (having average morality) has a reasonable motivation for their actions within context, then they are likely performing what they see to be the least reprehensible act (e.g. crashing a bus full of Jews to stop a terrorist who could potentially kill thousands). Alternatively they could be a psychopathic serial killer who just happens to live in a Jewish neighborhood. We have too little information to compare them to the Anti-Semite.
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@Tarik
@3RU7AL
@Double_R
Could each of you state your position on whether objective facts exist, along with a one sentence definition of objective in that context? I'm having trouble keeping track of what you're arguing over.
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Summary of things I understand Musk is planning/has done (no doubt subject to change, as we're literally dealing with an eccentric billionaire):
- Twitter verification, including the coveted blue checkmark, will soon be available to anyone for $8/month. Any time you change your handle the check will be temporarily removed (presumably to prevent fraud, this makes sense to me.)
- Any impersonation accounts not clearly marked as parody will be banned without warning
- Vague intention to improve the search function?
- Something about an improved ability to include longform text without just screenshotting a text document.
- approximately half of the previous company workforce was laid off with 3 months severance.
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I don't use twitter a whole lot but was curious if anyone has opinions.
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CLASSIFIEDI can’t tell you.
I like this joke.
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I think there are a number of reasons for the prevalence of violence in video games. The fantasy/power trip aspect definitely plays a part, but I think that it developed largely around game design. Donkey Kong's main challenge is dodging the barrels thrown by the titular character. You could make the game without DK, with randomly falling barrels, but it would lack the narrative that DK and Jumpman (Mario) share around the kidnapped girlfriend. Similarly, Mario levels would be much easier without enemies attacking you, and they again add to the narrative of Bowser and his Koopa army.
Other games like the Goldeneye FPS were based on popular media, so you would have to look at that to see how violence has arisen there.
Another aspect is that violent games, especially FPS games, are inherently very engaging. You have a 3D environment you can move through, resource monitoring (ammo and health) and clear goals with challenging obstacles (enemies and mission objectives). You can have all of those things without violence, but violence and power struggles are part of human psychology; we find a conflict more engaging than a physical challenge. The blood and gore and killing isn't necessary, plenty of people will play sports or sports video games, but we still tend to use language associated with violent conflict-- "We destroyed them," "He's killing it" and almost all multiplayer games have winners and losers.
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@PREZ-HILTON
we can't allowed leftists whose policies would turn us into a 3rd world country to continue to beat us merely because we refuse to lower ourselves to their level
Wouldn't a moderate candidate that steals Democrat votes be more successful? There's a reason Biden won the Democrat ballot over an extremist like Bernie Sanders.
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@PREZ-HILTON
the right tries to distance themselves from people like those on January 6
I live in Idaho, which is a solidly red state. I regularly see Trump flags on the back of pickup trucks or in front yards. Many (if not most) Republicans here still believe that the election was stolen and that the January 6 actions were justified.
If you're talking about the Republican Party's official stance on the matter, then yeah, a lot of them are distancing from Trump.
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@TWS1405
By "political violence will come from" do you mean that the left will incite the violence or that they will commit the violent acts? Both?
this November election day will be a repeat of the left throwing its infinite temper tantrum.
The left didn't respond violently to the 2020 election. January 6 was Trump and Trump supporter's reactions to what they viewed as a stolen election. I do not know or care enough to say how much if any voter fraud took place in 2020. I was too young to vote then, so I wasn't following the elections. This isn't an invitation to enlighten me on the subject, as I still don't care. It's more important that we move on then spend the next two years complaining about a stolen election.
Also most people don't care enough about the midterms. I doubt any riots will take place on either side of the aisle.
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*Reagans
I take great joy from the fact that my 500th forum post (earning me a gold medal) was to make a meaningless, pedantic correction. I could have savored this, weighing the perfect moment and thing to say that would lend it the greatest significance.
This way probably better summarizes my influence on the site though.
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