Millions of newborns are forced into various religions without their consent. Basing your argument off of consent only is kinda a wash argument unless your willing to fight all the other things parents do to their children without their consent.

College: You get as much as you put in to it.

If one plans on going to college to check a box by getting a bachelor’s, degree, then that person should probably spend their time and money doing something else.

For someone who sees college as an opportunity to stress their ability to learn at levels much higher than what High School or even Trade School may do, then it will do wonderful things for you. The most useful skill academia teaches is the ability to learn complex ideas through abstraction.

As someone who has learned how to create a complex AI system with both long and short term memory, one thing I learned is that AI cannot teach AI. I apply my ability to learn by extending it to my AI agent to help it learn new patterns.

Considering that the death toll caused by the triangle trade is estimated to be between 6 million and 60 million Africans with a general consensus of ~17 million, I think you may need to re-evaluate just how brutal it was.

Many people will point out correctly that Africa already had a slave trade structure before America and Europe got involved; but the fact is the Western slavery was far worse than the slavery in Africa. For example, the fact that slaves’ children were born into slavery was uniquely American slavery. Basically, African nations did not dehumanize their slaves, and it’s incredible what brutal things humans can do to each other the moment one side doesn’t view the other side as thinking human beings, but rather cattle to be done with as they please.

You truly believe the semantics of the English language disproves the point? English and the way it defines “I” is greatly affected by things seperate from biological definitions (one being the spiritual concept of the “soul”)

Also, there did exist languages in other cultures that did not have the same concept of “I” as the English language. Your counter-argument is very weak.

You are correct, the person was on life support. But they grew and went through puberty like any other normal functioning human. (I believe the person was born brain dead, and the wealthy parents couldn’t let go so they kept the person on life support at home).

Cells are living things by definition. So it is alive, though the body functions more like a tree than a mammal at that point. But a decentralized nervous system grew around the different vital organs.

The real flip side of your question is: do you think you’d still be you as a “brain in a vat” without any body?

Ultimately this whole discussion boils down to challenging the definition of “you” or “I”. Biologically every “singular” person is the result of many living things working together, so the concept of “I” is an illusion. Physically, there is no “I”, but only “us”.

This makes the discussion easier. If the hand is removed, then of course “we” are different because “we” lost a piece of “us”. This would also be true if “our” brain was removed.

Nevertheless, there have been cases of brain dead people’s body adapting to the lack of central nervous system, so the body is more independently alive than we tend to give it credit.

It’s not about the content, but rather the skills gained when becoming an expert on the content. For example, physics degrees are often sought after in the financial realm because of they’re expert ability to model things with mathematics.

Philosophers are generally expert thinkers, writers, and debaters. Not a lot of jobs are hiring philosophers for their content knowledge, but instead, they’re hired for their skills.

BeliefPropagator posted a link above which possibly verifies the screenshot: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/11/grok-musk/

I get that we need to be wary of AI slop, I really do; but If speaking academic English with decent grammar becomes associated with talking “like a bot”, then we are cooked.

Open desmos. Graph y = x^2. Then graph y = (x)^2. Recognize that both graphs are identical. Realize the flaw in your argument.

It’s actually a bit ironic, because CRT is viewed by many White Americans as a theory which demonizes them; but CRT also defines how racism has harmed poor white people in the past and continues to do so today.

CRT defines the biggest winners of Racism in America as being wealthy white folks. According to CRT, Racism as we know it today, was created as a means to take advantage of poor whites. Rich plantation owners recognized slavery caused great economic harm to poorer whites who did not own slaves. So a solution to stop revolt was to create this system of Race so that poor whites would remain divided from black slaves, and not work together to retaliate.

CRT also claims that this is still occuring today. Racism continues to divide poor white people from poor people of color so that they don’t work together to fight against Injustice.

I understand, and I wish we could just halt some of the actions of those in power here in America, but that is not a realistic ask.

Also, you should care. Because there is a major difference between the prior genociders and the current genociders in power. The Trump administration dehumanizes the Palestinians, so they have zero ethical qualms about allowing the genocide to continue. In fact, they want to speed it up so that they can put a “ended the conflict between Israel and Palestine” trophy up on their proverbial shelf.

At least the Biden/Harris administration viewed the Palestinians as human beings still and were wrestling with the ethical violation. Now, I wish they did better. With a president Harris, there would at least been some hope that she would eventually put Palestinians lives ahead of geopolitical goals. With a Trump administration, there is miniscule hope that they will ever side with the Palestinians.

Hi there. This is the second thread I’ve seen you post this rhetoric. As an American who lives 6000 miles away from Israel, what exactly are you expecting? You want us to all take up arms, fly over the Atlantic Ocean and fight? If you are going to harshly condemn Americans actions, then at least provide a reasonable alternative to these actions.

The reality is Americans are doing this because elections is a way a lot of us feel like we can make a difference (regardless of the validity of these beliefs). To people who lack the ability to make predictions, the presidential election seemed like a lose/lose scenario regarding the topic of the Genocide of Palestinians. To people who have the ability to make predictions, they understood that voting Trump into power would result in more harm coming to the Palestinians, so we reluctantly went out and voted for Harris.

Here we are today, and most of our predictions regarding Trump is coming true, so some of us are now trying to rub it in the faces of the Americans who probably should have voted for Harris, but decided to sit home or vote third party on election day…

Now, I do hear you though. Ultimately, it sucks the most for Palestinians who are living the Genocide. Unfortunately, there isn’t much the average American can do about it, so we instead focus on topics that feel more practical (like the elections and American politics).

Sadly, the 7900xtx still competes with the 5080, since the 5080 is only ~15% faster than 4080 and the 7900xtx traded blows with the 4080.

AMD has a window of opportunity here that they’ll surely screw up by pricing the 9070xt too high…

Religion would make sense to me if it reverted back to polytheism… This monotheistic update was a garbage idea.

Polytheism feels like a superior theological model that is actually evidence based… For example, the personalities of the Greek gods were characterizations of which they were gods. This is also true with the Spirits in Native American religion. They were supernatural based on the natural.

I feel like Monotheistic religions rely on blind faith partly because of the evil problem. One god is supposed to be all powerful, one god is supposed to be omniscient, one god is supposed to be revered; but this means that the one god must be evil and good. Monotheism would make a lot more sense if they can all just collectively accept the notion they worship a neutral entity, not a good entity. Unfortunately, that doesn’t sound captivating enough, so instead, “the evil problem” continues.

You’d need both time travel and teleportation, or else you’ll find yourself in space when you travel forward or back in time. The Earth isn’t a stationary object

I think one misunderstanding is the goal behind karma. It’s not to achieve good karma, but to have a net zero karma. A way to reach zero karma is to perform good deeds without announcing or advertising it.

Yes, we are comparing the numbers to the highest voter turn out (which was last election). Biden was able to move 6-7 million more people to vote than Kamala, whereas Trump got about the same as he got in 2020.

Voters have to take some responsibility here. Trump’s base are all being con’d because they are ignorant on how most of the world works beyond their own backyard. Its possible that this is partly true for the 6-7 million people who didn’t vote this election cycle.

The issue isn’t so much that they didn’t vote for Kamala, but rather they did not have the ability to recognize Trump as the con that he is. Me being of average intelligence feels like this should have been easy to decipher.

The irony: This is basically what we have. When it comes to action, as senators, Kamala and Bernie voted the same way on most issues. Obviously, they are not the same people, but their viewpoints led to more or less the same voting actions.

You are making such a useless point that requires minimal effort or thought. It would be better if you actually shared a tangible concern rather than providing a strawman argument meant to cause an irrational fear in people reading your comment.

For example, you could have shared which group of people you want to be a protected class and is not by Irish law; or which group of people is currently a protected class by Irish law and should not be. At least, then, you would have brought up a real concern about how the Irish government is determining hate speech; because right now, all you are doing is fear mongering.