Give me something juicy
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Apartments and big cities are hell. People shouldn’t be shoved together like sardines.
I both thing people have a right to dignity, which by extension means they should have a day of how to live their lives. I also think that the general population shouldn’t vote. Against Democracy is a really good read if you haven’t read it.
For the record, I literally will drive people to the polls (since our current system creates better outcomes if more people vote) but I do really wish that most of them wouldn’t XD.
People have gotten way too comfortable with censoring speech. I understand the fight against intolerance and propaganda and how hopeless that fight can feel, but we’ve sometimes taken things too far and that’s only going to hurt us in the end. The left is not going to be the one that will take these compromises to the limit. We will be the most hurt by every bit of erosion we allowed to happen.
Specifically, I’m referring to efforts to get right wing platforms taken down not by being banned by a Facebook or Twitter or something, but by attacking the infrastructure on which a right wing website it run (such as attempts to get Truth social shut down by going after AWS, ISPs and other basic Internet infrastructure). It’s a similar approach as is sometimes done when they target payment processors and trying to shame them into banning these platforms from processing payments.
These types of attacks on speech should never be allowed no matter if it’s the left or the right. We can ban people from our private business or gathering place, but we shouldn’t be able to stop them from creating their own. And no, basic Internet infrastructure shouldn’t get to play the ‘private business’ card. They are effectively the roads, utilities and other generic infrastructure of the digital age.
Those attacks are no different from the right’s constant attacks on abortion clinics by attempting to subject them to needless and pointless regulations meant for full hospitals. Or as if we’d allowed a water company to start selectively shutting off water to places they don’t like.
We need more protections for the neutrality of infrastructure (both physical and digital) and keep the fights firmly restricted to end user platforms. Lest we find that someday our enemies have taken these tactics and beat us with them with far greater ruthlessness than we’d ever use.
Being mtf or ftm trans is conforming to gender stereotypes with extra steps. Abolishing gender stereotypes and letting everyone express themselves however they want would be far better for society overall.
I don’t mean that in a negative way and fully support respecting self identification because that has the best outcomes in the real world.
My controversial opinion is that if everyone has the right to self identification, I have the right to reject that identification. I am under neither logical nor moral obligation to accept another person’s beliefs about themselves or the world. Keep in mind I firmly assert that all people deserve to be treated with kindness and respect, I am making a descriptive not a normative statement. This is strictly a question of retaining the right to epistemological determination, “self identification” being based on that same exact fundamental premise.
That’s a fair perspective.
I appreciate your acknowledgement that all people have the right to their own self-determination; and I appreciate your affirmation that all people deserve to be treated with kindness and respect.
I would also ask, though, when you assert your right to your own evaluation of another person, do you also practice awareness that it is fundamentally your interpretation, and that your interpretation may be factually inaccurate?
Do you say, “My experience is that I think that person is a man,” or do you say, “I declare based on my observations that I know that that person is a man” ?
Most of the time, we have no way of knowing what sex organs someone has, regardless of the expression of their outward appearance. It’s true that we may often recognize certain characteristics that lead to familiar assumptions, but in almost all scenarios we are still either making our own guesses about someone else, or we are choosing to believe that they are whoever they say they are.
Also, when considering intersex people and other variations in sexual development, even if we guess correctly about the sex organs or characteristics that someone may have been born with, we may still be wrong about the person’s underlying genetic make up or hormone balances.
I guess I wonder, when you hold your right to determine your own evaluation of another person, is your thinking flexible enough that you can hold your own assumptions lightly?
I’ve also thought about that a bit. The way I see it, transgender people definitely are following local cultural terms. Not the ones that they are expected to follow, but still.
What’s considered masculine or feminine isn’t standard across different cultural contexts either. For example, wearing skirts or pink aren’t exclusively feminine. In a western context they currently are, so that’s why western MTFs are currently inclined to wear those.
However, that wasn’t always the case. If the same person had been born a few centuries ago, pink would not have meant the same thing, and they they would have probably felt differently about that color. Also, what westerners would consider a skirt these days, can be a masculine or gender neutral piece of clothing in other cultures. Even today, there are place where mean wear something that westerners would call a skirt.
I’ve got a few that I can’t really separate:
Dental hygienists are greedy charlatans who convince us we need an expensive hygiene appointment every six months when we really don’t. That used to be true before the invention of the electric toothbrush but not now. I stopped going 7 years ago and I make sure I brush properly daily for two minutes with my electric toothbrush. I occasionally use inter-dental brushes for a deeper clean and my teeth are perfect. No soreness, gum bleeding and certainly no cavities. It’s lies I tell ya.
AI is the most incredible development in human evolution since the invention of the wheel. I think it is the beginning of our next evolutionary step. It may even save us from destroying ourselves. It has brought me personally incredible results that have enriched my life in countless ways. I can’t wait to see where it takes us. People who are angry about it are dumb (you did say “controversial opinion” lol).
Money is basically the ring from Lord of the rings. You can’t have it without it changing you. I’ve had the dubious pleasure of knowing a great many millionaires and they’re all miserable bastards pretending that they’re not. Their families hate them, most of them are alcoholics and drug addicts. They hate themselves even more and their money doesn’t mean anything to them so they use it to impress others or hurt them, just so they can feel something. It’s all a disgustingly wasteful, tragic act.
Money is basically the ring from Lord of the rings.
I’ll still stick with my (perhaps naive) belief that people still have this backwards. Wealth is not magically corruptive like the ring was. Rather only people who are already problematic will end up with the sorts of wealth that it takes to be labeled as one of those rich assholes. They aren’t assholes cause they’re rich, they’re rich because they were assholes.
The system (and human society in general) rewards the worst of us with wealth. However, if you short circuit this process and give a good person wealth, you’ll find that a) they don’t magically become an asshole and b) they probably don’t stay rich for very long. Typically because they’ve given most of it away as they don’t need it and don’t define themselves by having it.
If you want a great example of how instantly otherwise good people become the worst versions of themselves almost overnight watch what happens when a rich person with a large family dies. I did a couple of years in the will writing sector. I’m telling ya… zero to Golem in no time at all. I’ve also watched good people I knew extremely well turn bad too many times to remember. It all starts with “I couldn’t possibly have servants. How embarrassing!” and before you know it it’s “Eduardo! I’ve told you a hundred times I need my watermelon juice chilled! One more mistake and it’s back to Caracas!”. People should have to undergo intense psychological training to be able to be rich and stay human.
As the other commenter said, I’m not really sure these people were ‘good’ before. Maybe Sunday school ‘good’ as in they were good at faking things.
But sure, if you want to call it that, then I’ll just say that yes, some humans effectively have a negative gene that only activates if they get wealthy. A predisposition to rich asshole-ness.
I do not believe this is a universal trait or even a majority trait however. And, while these people aren’t good, they aren’t the sort of evil that’s implied when you’re talking about billionaires.
Aunt Becky going full Karen just cause she got a million dollars in a will is far different than healthcare CEOs knowingly implementing policies to auto deny coverage for kids with cancer just so they can earn another billion that they don’t actually need, care about or even use.
No matter how much of a bitch Becky became, she’s unlikely to suddenly be cool with the murder of children just because of some money in her bank account. It’s not that kind of evil corruptive force. Those traits had to be there from the beginning.
How did you know they were “good people” before? Some folks are just never in a position of power for their morals to be tested, and then they are and you discover who they are. I agree with the previous poster.
I don’t think we’re on opposite sides of any argument here mr argumentativemonotheist (great username btw 🤣). The only slight difference is that I’m saying that almost no one, in my experience, survives that test.
Somewhere around the majority of people employed in academia are absolutely useless.
I say this as an academic.
It aint just academia.
I wanted to pursue academia until I met academics. I realized it was all dick measuring contests and covert social signalling. To get ahead you to understand the unspoken and political rules. It was a very disheartening realization. I didn’t have the heart to stomach it so I ended up pursuing a different career path
When I was in art school our TA’s were making 20k a year but stilling on 50k - 100k in student debt. They’d all been to bigger, more prestigious art schools, and they were barely getting by. And each of these schools was churning out hundreds or thousands of students every year.
That convinced me to take a different direction in life. Glad I did. I’m still a working artist and make a good living with it as a side hustle, but I’m glad I don’t have to live with the uncertainty.
No state that is in the Eastern Time Zone is a part of the Midwest.
Johnny Kitagawa’s child sexual abuse was confirmed in a trial over gossip magazine reports.
Johnny & Associates, which continued to have him involved with minors for over 15 years, engaged in organized child sexual exploitation and should be defined as a mafia.
Therefore, all organizations that did business with the company, including ISPs, universities, UMG, and Nintendo, should be defined as affiliated with the mafia.
Following “if it isn’t harmful, it’s not a problem” as a guideline, incest isn’t immoral if it doesn’t involve large power imbalance (e.g.: parent and offspring) and doesn’t produce offspring.
If the relationship, be it purely romantic or otherwise is mutually desired and fully consensual (usual requirements), then I don’t see how it would be different from other non-standard relationships.I hope that’s plenty controversial.
If the two individuals aged for a significant part of their lives together, offsprings are not the only “harm”.
Forming relationships with people that are different (as in, not relatives) helps avoid the bad parts of the family structure (the weird beliefs, opinions, behaviours, etc, that are taught within a family but are not accepted outside of it). Without that, you can end up with something that seems like “cultural inbreeding” where the weirdness persists and grows, until it reaches weird shit.
On a side note
Arguably a similar effect already happens in western countries thanks to xenophobia, and that’s why you have people that care so much about transmitting their DNA and having their own biological kids as if it mattered. This is just the remnants of a deeply racist culture that believes that you need to preserve your family line, and with it, your DNA. If people were mixing more with other cultures and origins, this would seem much more absurd.
Forming relationships with people that are different (as in, not relatives) helps avoid the bad parts of the family structure
That is an argument from utility, which can most certainly be debated. What constitutes “bad”? That is a subjective interpretation.
where the weirdness persists and grows, until it reaches weird shit.
And how do we define “weird shit”? Are “normal” relationships not “weird shit” and don’t they lead to “weird shit”?
their DNA and having their own biological kids as if it mattered.
Well, it matters to them. Therefore, it matters. Doesn’t it? It does to them.
Genuinely just poking at arguments here, I have no decided opinion either way.
I get what you’re going for here. But another caveat to add would be that the people in this sort of relationship shouldn’t have children. They might be able to get away with that for one generation, but if incest runs in the family then it won’t take long for things to start going south
I get what you’re going for here. But another caveat to add would be that the people in this sort of relationship shouldn’t have children.
Which is in my 1st sentence.
Whoops, misread that
Do you think people with autism, downs syndrome, or cognitive impairments should have kids?
I see what you’re trying to do here and I don’t like it
im fine with trans people and non discrimination but my whole life sex and gender terms were one and the same for me and most folks in everyday language. The idea of identifying pronouns for myself seems laughable to me. Im a big believer in simple solutions. Got some temp work at a place with genderless bathrooms that had the full floor to ceiling doors. Its a bit wierd to wash my hands with girls but its not like im naked. There is all sorts of language things going out of fashion (online) and folks are like just learn it but look despite decades of school my spelling and grammar are atrocious because habits don’t change easily and no one is even forcing me to study or anything now. On top of it, like it or not for the internet folks, it has no bearing in the outside world which is still basically jugging along at its own pace. It will over time for sure but it won’t happen as quickly as early adopters would like. Also I pretty much don’t like any type of censorship of fictinoal things. Reality and fiction are two different things to me. Although modern ability to fake things is making identifying something as real as tough. I don’t want claims of it being high end fakes as letting folks get away with crimes.
People have the right to define themselves however they want. Likewise, people have the right not to share those determinations.
If others have the right to see themselves however they want, I have the right to see themselves however I want too. Reciprocity works like that.
You really want one?
Okay:
Race-Based Affirmative Action is harmful discrimination against Asians and I, as an Asian American, don’t really like it, particularly in the context of it being used as a deciding factor in college admissions.
(Affirmative action based on other factors like income or disability is fine, but using race is kinda weird to me… too arbitrary)
Yeah, I always thought Affirmative Action should be much more strongly influenced by zip code.
Human beings should stop reproducing and walk towards extinction, we’ve done enough and irreparable damage to the nature
There’s no ethical way to kill someone who’s done nothing to you and doesn’t want to die.
I feel like ‘done nothing to you’ is too vague here.
If someone is currently attempting to murder my child is that ‘nothing to me’ or is emotional harm considered?
If someone is attacking a stranger in front of me is that ‘nothing to me’ or is the trauma of seeing another human attacked considered ‘doing something to me’
If someone is systematically committing genocide of a people not related to me in anyway (and it’s fully provable) is that ‘nothing to me’ or is it an affront to human decency and therefore count as harm to myself as a fellow human.
Basically there’s a million ways to justify someone has harmed you.
I’m sure you already know the (your, if you prefer) answers to these questions. Do you mind sharing them with us? I guess, at the end of the day, the bigger question is: do we have a moral duty towards our fellow men?
I mean I feel like the first two are obvious. Imminent harm happening immediately in front of us are pretty well trod moral grounds.
The third is probably just justice? 99% of the time that’s going to be handled via a war or international court or a trial of the previous government.
Things obviously get fuzzier the more defused your ‘personal harm’ is and I’m truly not sure where my line would be, especially as the more abstract it is the more the consequences influence my answer.
At some point I’m simply not willing to take the moral choice to kill someone doing something bad simply because of the personal impacts it would have on my life. Going to trial, possibly jail over it, mental trauma from having carried out the action etc.
And that’s only for scenarios where there’s rock solid evidence, which mostly wouldn’t be the case. If I had spotty evidence then I’m less willing to take risks on any sort of action.
I understand “not taking risks” as a morally correct stance if you don’t have enough information (you could mistake the victim for the offender, for instance), but I understood these scenarios as something you’re present for, understand clearly and are capable of acting upon. I know this goes way beyond the original question, but, would you say that “the right thing to do” remains obvious, it’s just that it’s not so easy to be self-sacrificial? I mean, if you could singlehandedly stop a genocide from taking place, but you were gonna be somewhat traumatised for it, or someone in your family had to pay the price, I think stopping it remains the right thing to do, regardless of how willing we would be to do it, right?
Oh yeah, totally agree with that take. My ability to execute is separate from the moral good or bad of the situation.
Through that lens, then I’d consider most of these scenarios a moral good. I’m not really someone who holds with ‘all life is sacred’ or ‘everyone can be redeemed’, at least in scenarios where they have actively sought to kill others. For whatever reason, some humans are just bad people and need to be eliminated for the safety of others.
If they were easily neutralized, I’d prefer going through a proper justice system, but if not, then that’s merely a consequence of their own actions that they were taken down.
Is this controversial? I guess it is if by ‘someone’ you’re including nonhuman animals.
Huh?
There’s no ethical way or no ethical reason to kill them?
There’s both, it’s just bugging me that I don’t understand how I disagree with you.
It takes just as much faith to believe that the universe came into existence out of nothing as it does to believe a higher being created it.
I agree. Though I still think if God is real hes kind of an asshole lmao. Like why butthole cancer, man? Couldn’t you have just not created that?
Probably because of something related to butthole development, lol, or cell growth in general. Perhaps it was unavoidable in the way God wanted to fashion us and the world. And it is not a perfect place but, if it weren’t for our own disunion and ignorance, it would be so much better. Imagine if we only had to contend with accidental deaths, medical issues and natural disasters…
Then it takes twice as much faith to believe a higher being existed before anything else…
It’s a chicken/egg.
If you want to be the most scientific these days it’s bubbles of reality getting created when two dimensional planes intersect or just come close to bumping up together. Which forms a bubble dimension which would have essentially random physics every time.
Which is pretty fucking far down the line to “nothing” but at the end of the day, what created the planar dimensions?
All adding a higher power does is add an extra step. Maybe it’s there, maybe it’s not.
It changes nothing. Because something created that first.
There’s energy/matter and no matter what we come up with to rationalize that (even the Matrix) it doesn’t explain it the whole way through, all of this is fundamentally impossible and we just have to accept that.
And also even if there’s an afterlife, were unlikely to get all the answers, because it almost certainly be some sort of middle management higher being who is just as ignorant of what made it, till maybe if/when it dies in which case our “ever after” has an end date.
Like, everyone just has to eventually reach the point they stop caring and settle for a personal “good enough”. Organized religion just gives everyone a set playbook which makes it easier to accept.
Who said anything about organized religion?
Then a higher power is an absolutely unnecessary step that provides zero benefit…
It’s not a question of benefit or necessity. It’s a question of what actually happened.
Then what created your higher power?
The question is the same, you latched onto an additional point and acted like it not applying invalidated everything else…
Logic ain’t going to work, I’m sorry.
Exactly. You can believe either as the first step.The first step requires faith because the evidence isn’t available.
RespectfulIy, I don’t think it does, and I’m a monotheist. It takes no faith to disregard any notion of the Divine, it takes no “stepping out of the comfort zone” of the material, the seen, but it does take faith and courage to believe in the unseen. And I’m not saying the existence of God is incompatible with a reasonable understanding of the universe, just that it cannot be encapsulated by it. Through reason you can make a regression until the beginning of the universe, but after that it’s all faith.
Faith is not restricted to believing in things unseen. Faith can be believing in something even when the empirical evidence and logic aren’t strong enough to make it likely. This applies both to the existence of a higher being and the presumption that all the matter, energy, and order of the universe appeared from nothing.
I support Age Verification
(Not to be confused with: I like Age Verification.)
For a few reasons.
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- The government already has all of your info and is spying on you from any device with a camera or microphone and wireless connection and without a warrant or meaningful accountability. We know this objectively because the FBI, desperate to look competent, inadvertently publicized footage obtained illegally in the Guthrie case that shouldn’t have existed.
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- It’s not 2014. We have enough information now to know definitively that social media (and increasingly, use of LLM’s) is harmful to children’s mental health, and that its negative effects are more pronounced on developing brains. (Though they affect adults as well.) These systems harm a person’s mental health and cognitive abilities, and while this bit is anecdotal, I know several teachers who struggle to teach kids because they’re no longer able to focus on anything for more than sixty seconds. (And the question: “Why do I have to know this if an AI can do it for me?” is becoming a common refrain.)
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- Private entities also already have your data. Go look yourself up on spokeo.com or some other background check site if you don’t think so. (And be sure to put in a request there to have your info deleted while you’re at it.) Or sub to a deletion service that will remove it for you.
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- People say that to cut kids off from social media will isolate them, but I grew up in a world where we only had email, chat rooms, snail mail, and land lines, and somehow we magically made friendly connections anyway. It’s a nonsense argument, and ignores that social media itself is isolating people to a much greater extent.
Essentially, I think Age Verification is the lesser of two huge evils, and I don’t expect the government in my country to force social media companies to disclose and change their algorithms to eliminate the harm being done to kids, so Age Verification becomes a necessary evil. (Hopefully a short-term one, but we’ll see.) The social media companies have too much money for any civil suit to meaningfully impact them financially.
I’m not against age verification as a concept. But I don’t think the current solutions will actually protect children. They are simply a further attack on privacy. We will have less privacy and our kids will still be just as unsafe as before.
And I give it less than 6 months before this data is used for something other than protecting kids. It’s absolutely just going to be used to target LGBT content or something.
Upvoted because it is a controversial take.
My problem with age verification is that what we’re being sold is not what we’re going to get.
“Choosing the lesser of two evils” implies that only two options exist. When the same companies are responsible for both evils, we should be talking alternatives, not letting them make us decide between getting punched in the face and giving up our lunch money to make it stop.
If not one of these two evils, then what’s the third option?
My reply here.
Tl;dr:
- Support decentralized alternatives*
- Exercise parental controls on-device and IRL
- Teach the children what we learned
It’s not a magic bullet, but it’s better than putting the Epstein class in charge of protecting the children.
*Obviously, there are cesspools on the Fediverse, too. But we’re incentivized and empowered to curate and to moderate these spaces, in ways that we’re not on Twitter.
There is no ‘we’ in your hypothetical, unless you’re sitting on a billionaire fortune or a member of the Epstein class.
The only power you or I have is local, and this is a national problem.
There is no ‘we’ in your hypothetical
We is everyone that isn’t those companies and is impacted by social media.
The only power you or I have is local, and this is a national problem.
We do have little power on a national level, but that doesn’t mean the only power we have is local.
Sure, we can’t
flip a switchtell the engineers to program a switch and flip it for us like Musk and Zuckerberg can, but that’s not the only power that matters.We can build and support alternatives to addictive, enshittified centralized tech (like the Fediverse). I was offered the “choice” of accepting a degraded Twitter experience or paying for Twitter premium. I chose to check out Mastodon.
We can use the parental controls we do have, both inside the ecosystem and in the real world. No screens in the bedroom or at the dinner table. No smartphone until you’re 16. Schools that ban phones in the classroom. Venues that ban phones during shows.
Edit: Another option is educating ourselves and our children to be safe on the internet. I had to learn that the correct response to “what are you wearing” is “a robe and wizard hat” and then blocking the pedophile all on my own because my parents didn’t know those threats even existed. I do. Most parents in 2026 do.
I’m not imaginative, but we have a lot more power than just choosing between “let it suck forever” and “give up even more of your privacy and I’ll pretend to fix the problems I created/encouraged because I make more money that way.”
Go look yourself up on spokeo.com
I looked at my email and it says I’m some random lady who I’ve never met. What should I make of this?
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