Everything that matters in life is subjective. Everything depends on infinite unknowns and unknowables truly beyond human comprehension. All morality, right and wrong, all action and thought, is inherently whimsical. You don’t need any reason at all. Therefore God both does and doesn’t exist.
Academia Is Not Law, especially when it comes to subjective things involving marginalised groups. There can be and are massive systematic and institutional failures that mean many papers are misleading.
Most people broadly agree that the treatment of people with mental conditions, black people, lgbt people, etc was shocking and unacceptable even 50 years ago… And yet some people assume we’ve “fixed” that nowadays and everything is above board and perfectly fair and ethical.
“We’ve had a black President, so we don’t need anti-discrimination laws or DEI initiatives anymore!”
prosecuting hateful speech is a very slippery slope. It effectively gives the government the authority to decide what speech is allowed, which can’t end well.
For the most part, defending free speech. It’s been watered down to be interpreted as “speech I agree with”.
Polarization fed by poor education fed by poverty in the US over the last few decades has left people believing in false dichotomies; if you’re not with me you’re against me. See it on Lemmy a lot actually, people being nervous when you don’t clearly support or agree with them and then get defensive as they assume you must be “the other” group.
We live in a world now where money and scale supporting shitty and /or dangerous ideas hardly make it the traditional town square of ideas though. I have my own internal struggles with it.
Depends on where you say it but my most polarized take was: investment based on interest (usury) is just a legalized form of fraud.
You can always make the argument that charging money on money is literally how much of the global economy functions, but from a purely ethical perspective, it has the same if not worse effect of how a landlord rents land.
Yeah it can work, but often times it just goes unregulated and becomes a form of abuse designed to milk you dry.
Everything relating to loans these days is backed by some mega bank, which is in cahoots with every other bank, which also runs the federal reserve in the USA, so they basically have overwhelming control of the economy, which happens to be built on trillions of dollars of debt servicing (35t for the government).
The 2008 market crash was a result of fraud at basically every level of the economy from a single person all the way to the board members of banks like BofA, Chase, etc and even the SEC. Realtors were selling faulty and risky adjustable rate mortgages, which were then being packaged into mortgage backed securities (MBS), which were then being misreported as AAA value by every rating agency who were also in cahoots with every bank, which were then being packed into huge collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) which they themselves were being repackaged into even bigger CDOs and synthetic CDOs which every bank was basically gambling money on.
All it took was for the faulty mortages to start to fail past only something like 8%, and every thing backing that (MBS, CDOs) collapsed and lost value.
Except because about the only people who were trading these massive gambling pools were banks, so they lied about the value of the assets (particularly the MBSs via aformentioned ratings agencies) which they sold and then promptly shorted to protect themselves from the problem they created.
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Sharing this sentiment will basically get you laughed out of the room from any finance program because so much of the economy is fundamentally based around interest, ie the cost of borrowing money. Even genuinely safe options like credit unions still have interest, albeit at much much lower rates that are much more practical.
But to me, it will always seem like a form of fraud.
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In case your wondering, the reason its polarizing is because there is a significant portion of people that actually do believe the above, notably a lot of Islamic countries. They have lots of banks that do not engage in interest based transactions, which is interesting but often seems to lack any research about it compared to a typical system.
The global market also doesn’t take them too seriously because most of those countries (controversially) also have regular banks too, that also just so happened to be involved with schemes that caused economic turmoil, especially countries that take IMF loans. Most of them have shot themselves in the foot already and have nothing much to stand on now.
Circumcision is genital mutilation.
INB4 “but what about female circumsision”
What’s interesting about that one is that as best I can tell, it’s only millennials who got caught up on this. Gen X didn’t care and as best I can tell, Zoomers don’t either.
I’m Gen X and I agree with OP.
The most vitriolic responses were from fathers who don’t want to admit they mutilated their sons.
Horse riders should have to clean up after their horses on trails.
I’m a big believer in leave no trace in the outdoors. To the best of your ability, everything should be as you found it when you leave the woods.
Wild horses have been extinct in north America for many thousands of years, in my local area as far as fossil and archeological records can show any native horses that might have existed here were long gone before the first native Americans set foot here. They are not a part of the ecosystem.
I don’t care if it’s biodegradable, I wouldn’t leave apple cores and banana peels behind either.
The environment in my local parks isn’t so delicate that a few entitled rich assholes leaving behind horse shit probably isn’t going to make a significant impact, but there are other places where it absolutely could, throwing off the chemical composition of the soil, contaminating ground water, causing algal blooms, introducing non-native parasites, bacteria, and pathogens, etc. and you should be following best practices across the board. Treat every inch of the outdoors as if it were potentially vulnerable and don’t try to bend the rules just because you think you can get away with it.
And it’s just an eyesore and detracts from the natural beauty.
The horse people fire back about how they can’t carry a shovel with them, or how they may not be able to safely get on or off the horse. This is the shit horses were bred for- to carry people and stuff, I can find you an avalanche shovel and a small folding step stools that will break down plenty small and light enough to fit in a backpack or lash to the saddle with some rope to pull the stool up after you get on, and it’s all gonna weigh a lot less than the armor, and rifles, bedrooms, etc. that people used to ride horses with for a lot longer and harder than the couple house you’re spending plodding along the trail. If you can afford to go horseback riding you can afford the hundred bucks or so for a shovel and a step stool. If that’s not enough for you to get on and off your horse safely on the trail, maybe you should take that as a sign that you shouldn’t be riding a horse there, stick to a dude ranch where some big strong cowboy will help you get on and off of the horsey.
Agreed. I don’t care how big the shit is. If dog owners have to pick up their dog shit, horse owners should have to pick up their horse shit.
And the horse people will try to retort that dog poop takes longer to break down, smells worse, and is more likely to spread disease
Which is true, still doesn’t justify not cleaning up after your horse. Just because the horse manure is “less bad” doesn’t make it ok.
Horse riders should have to clean up after their horses on trails.
Oh, but horse riders do. It’s when pigs are riding the horses, they don’t.
If they do where you live, I’m happy for you, but I’ve spent a lot of time hiking in my area hiking on shared use trails and have never seen any rider clean up after their horses or who even looked like they were prepared to, and there is always horse manure along the trails.
Cops should too, I make no exception for them.
I mean forget trails, there’s horse shit all over my city centre every time there’s a football match :(
I mean aren’t oil leaking and gas spewing motorbikes and four-wheelers just as bad for the environment? On top of the sound pollution. But yeah the horse people could have a buggy pulling the shovel for sure.
They absolutely are, and if there were any ATV trails in my area I’d feel just ash strongly about that. As it is though, a lot of these trails aren’t even open to pedaled mountain bikes (partially because they spook some of the horses) and with the ones that are, there’s some significant debate on whether e bikes should be allowed.
Another thought that crossed my mind, since most of these people don’t live with their horses within horseback -riding distance of most of these trails, so these people usually have to go hitch up a horse trailer to a gas guzzler of a pickup truck and drive sometimes a pretty considerable distance to take their horses out. Often the parking areas at the trail heads aren’t particularly well suited to accommodating a truck and horse trailer, and they end up being kind of a parking nuisance on top of that.
I’ve got two.
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The US has arrived at the stage where an entirely new constitution/model of government, probably down to the very borders of the states themselves in the 48, needs to be implemented, just to let off the pressure of just how large a scale the US operates on in every dimension compared to what the original 13 were looking at.
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The two state solution has been rendered untenable by Israel’s settler shit, the best way to protect the interests of Palestinians is to break down the border entirely and make them voting citizens with a say in the Knesset, and at this point I am convinced the only way that can be established is with an occupation force from outside both nations ready and willing to haul off anyone doing anything to threaten the coexistence and execute them. They won’t coexist in peace, so let them coexist under the sword of Damocles. If I had my way honestly, Jerusalem would have a nuke installed under the temple mount, with a switch set to destroy the city entirely if they’re going to insist on continuing to try and total victory wipe eachother out.
If they can’t have the land together, they’ll have the ashes together.
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“I understand why terrorists attack the West.”
Having been in a long-time resident of a region of brown people that the West sees as subhuman, I don’t condone terrorist actions, but I sure do understand why some of them do it. Some people just see an action, read or hear the words, without context and judge a person based on that, but they forget that humans are the sum of their experiences.
Just like a small-town bumpkin in Australia might hate brown people for how they brought up, a refugee hating the West might’ve lived in constant fear of being bombed by a drone, seen the consequences thereof, and been pointed at a generic Westerner as the source of evil.People that I’ve talked to who have lived outside of Western countries understand what I mean, but many Westerners think I’m saying terrorism is justifiable or even good.
Often terrorism is “poking the bear”, some groups do it so that the “bear” totally messes up a country, so that the group can then gain power
In physics lab we had 2 linear polarizers and by varying their relative angle, could polarize or block all light.
I also used a circular polarizer, but that didn’t feel as polarizing to me.
Burn the witch!
Why not… Three linear polarizers?
Then you can really do some field reorientation
… Come to think of it, why not four or five?
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Free will, the sense, that you could have done otherwise, is an illusion.
We make choices based on either what we have to do, or what we want to do. There’s no freedom in having to do something, but you’re also not free to choose your wants. If you felt like having tea this morning instead of coffee, then having tea is the only thing you could have done. You wanted tea, not coffee. Now, if we rewind the clock back in time to the moment before you decided, you’d pick tea again, and again, and again. Everything else being the same, your desire for tea will override the desire for coffee every time. And you didn’t choose that desire.
I personally go a step further.
Everything in the universe is following the laws of physics. We don’t know all of the laws, and we’re limited in what we’re actually able to perceive and measure, so some of it seems like random chance. But at the end of the day, everything is playing out according to those laws.
Your thoughts, feelings, etc. are all just physical and chemical reactions happening in your brain, no different than iron rusting, water evaporating, unstable atoms decaying, etc. you don’t get any more say in what you think, feel, say, or do than you do over whether vinegar and baking soda are going to react with each other.
The only thing special about us is that we’re aware that things are happening, even if we can’t fully perceive the causes. We don’t really get any say in what the meat does, even if it something feels like we do, we’re just along for the ride, but the fact that we’re aware it’s happening is pretty cool. There’s a quote, I forget by who and the exact wording, that we are “the universe experiencing itself” and I think that’s all we’re doing, experiencing. We don’t genuinely have any agency, not even about what we think about the experience, because thinking is a part of what we’re experiencing.
If somehow you knew the exact state of every elementary particle that existed the moment the big bang happened, and had a complete rulebook of all of the unknown laws of physics we have yet to discover, you could theoretically trace out the paths those particles would take from there, what other particles they would eventually collide and interact with, how those interactions would play out as they come together to form nebulas, stars, planets, and eventually yourself and everything else around you, and you could keep going tracing out the paths of those particles into the future and see what becomes of everything in the universe and how it all ends (if in fact it does eventually come to an end)
I could be wrong, and if it ever turns out we do have an actual say in what we think, feel, and do, that would be even more amazing. If not though, I’m satisfied to just be along for the ride to see where I end up and what I can experience along the way.
It’s rare that I agree with every single point in a long post like that, but here we are. Couldn’t have said it better myself.
Consciousness truly is the thing there that matters the most. The fact that it feels like something to be. Sam Harris says that consciousness is the only thing in the entire universe that cannot be an illusion. Even if we’re in a simulation and everything you’ve ever experienced has been fake, the sense of experience itself is still real.
Okey but does it even matter then? If my understanding of “free will” matches your understanding of “not free will” and you telling me “you couldn’t do otherwise”, while i am telling you “i don’t want to do otherwise”, aren’t we splitting hairs?
Well not really. We’ve lived without free will just fine untill now so becoming aware of it’s absence doesn’t really change much.
What it does change for me however is that the flipside of it is no self, meaning there’s no free will because there’s no one making choices. I don’t believe in the imagined “me” that’s located behind my eyes and looking out into the world and authoring my actions. This pretty much pulls the rug out of blame. Who am I blaming exactly? The universe?
An economy that relies on basic human needs being treated as an investment is a failed economy. (Housing)
I agree, but maybe houses can still be paid, but if you cant afford it theres also (smaller) free housing.
I would say the most polarizing thing I’ve ever said at least in an online community is that there should be spaces specifically for men to congregate where they can talk about their issues among like-minded men.
This was in response to me discovering that of the eight gyms within a 10 mile radius of my home, three of them are all gender gyms and five of them are women’s only gyms.
Of the associations in my area, places where people of like-minded orientation congregate, 4 of them are all gender, 12 of them are female only.
There are no male only semi-private spaces that I can find within a 25 mile radius of my home and I live in a city of over 500,000 people.
Of the multitude of homeless housing, homelessness support, soup kitchen, and other resources for the incredibly poor and disaffected, roughly half of them are explicitly female only, and all of the remainder are all gender with a preference for supporting women.
To me this is especially terrifying because of the homeless population that I have encountered only a vanishingly small fraction of them are women. The great majority by and far of the maybe 40 or 60 homeless people I have seen in the last year have been male.
If it is okay for women to have women only spaces why is it not okay for men to have men only spaces?
If it is okay for women to receive women only support, why is it not okay for men to receive men only support?
I overall agree that for some things it can make sense to have separate gendered spaces, shelters make sense, I can see gyms, etc. places where people are feeling particularly vulnerable, self conscious, dealing with trauma, etc. and being around the opposite gender could be a part of that.
But in other cases, I think the right move is to get over ourselves and be rid of pointless gendering in some activities.
A lot of my friends and myself are traditionally “manly” in a lot of ways, outdoorsy, cigar smokers, whiskey drinkers, a lot of us work with our hands, like guns, etc. That said, we’re a pretty enlightened group, we’re not out shit-talking our wives and engaging in demeaning “locker room” talk and such when we get together to have what could be loosely called our “boys nights out.” It’s happened from time to time that a female friend ends up tagging along and absolutely nothing changes about our behavior, the fact that there is a woman in the room in no way takes away from the experience, and if anything adds to it in a “the more the merrier” sort of way. Any woman who is willing to put up with the cigar smoke, fart jokes, peeing on trees in the woods, etc. is more than welcome to come along, it just happens that most don’t enjoy that.
Now of course you also run into a whole lot of complicated situations, the way men tend to interact with other men, and the way women interact with other women are different. I’m not going to go into all of the nature vs nurture, societal expectations, toxic masculinity, etc. involved but all of that certainly plays a big part. I’m no sociologist, but my overall impression (and I may be wrong)is that women can kind of mesh into the male social structure without making too many waves provided that the men aren’t assholes (which is far from guaranteed,) but it’s very hard for a lot of men to get themselves into the right kind of headspace to participate in the sort of socializing women want and need from their social groups without disrupting things to the point that the women aren’t able to get what they need out of it.
And circling around to shelters, men may need more shelters by sheer numbers, but on average each individual homeless woman is probably in a more vulnerable position than the average homeless man. Really more shelter space is needed across the board.
I going about the shelter thing, a few years ago they did a study and there was not a single shelter for men in the country.
And I get it, it’s important to take care of women, sure, but when somebody tried to start a support shelter for men there was a massive public outcry about it.
And even if you had the time and inclination to for instance start a men’s only gym, why would you risk all of that time and effort on the odd chance that you would offend a person who has a following and knows how to raise a Battle cry and next thing you know you’ve got a hundred angry protesters outside of your gym even though there are five female only gyms within walking distance because you have a men’s only gym.
It’s much easier to create a space that’s just slightly uninviting for the average woman and then let the chips fall where they may.
It’s easier to pass the buck and say somebody else will take care of the guys. We don’t need to build men’s only shelters. Guys are more resilient than women. Guys aren’t as at risk as women are. Guys are shitty people in general and life gives them so many breaks, they don’t need any additional support while there are still women who have needs.
Let’s not start a men’s only club because all it takes is one woman getting upset and suing us for discrimination and next thing we know we are out $250,000 in lawyer fees all because we wanted to have a boys space.
Let’s just let all of the men suffer in silence forever and ever. They’ll be okay they’ll just rub some dirt in it and move on.
I’m a little salty. But I can cope. But I still feel emboldened to express that I dislike the inequality and I wish things were a little better.
Agreed. The need for all kinds of mens-groups is probably higher than it has ever been. I’d love something where I could join a group of men and build / fix something together.
Two space indent is better than tab indent.
This is the one i dislike the most in this thread, you monster!
Jesus
Deganawida!
Uh… If you insist, then four space indent. There is no “two space” indent.
But just use tab. Ugh… Monsters…
Found the YAML guy.
Must also hate lines of text longer than 70 characters lol?
This user curses!
It hasn’t gone well the times that I’ve said that it is better to not feed stray pets if you are not going to take further care of them. In the sense that helping the chances of more uncontrolled offspring just means more suffering in the end.
You can do both. Getting stray pets, especially cats, spayed and neutered and returned to where they were found is very much a thing.
It’s such a painful choice. I can’t take in more pets, but I can’t stand to see one suffering.
The last true stray I adopted ended up giving me a litter of kittens before I could get her fixed, then ran away. Ever since all my pets (cats) have been from shelters.
To be fair I still feed opossums regardless.
