Yeah... calling people who are worried about what a fascist tyrant may do "little snowflakes" would be more impressive if the conservatives in America were not the most censorious little snowflakes in the country. Seriously - there is nobody more easily offended than a conservative. They may rail against political correctness but they have their own brand of it. The major difference is that theirs is not polite and isn't done out of concern for anybody but themselves. Liberal PC tries to keep you from harming vulnerable people. Conservative PC tries to keep you from being appropriately critical of government policy.
Liberals complain if you use the n-word. Conservatives complain if you burn a flag. Liberals just want trans people to be able to pee where they feel most comfortable, conservatives can't stand that but will defend a politician who enjoyed walking in on nude, underage girls in their dressing rooms.
Liberals say "maybe we should stop shooting unarmed people for walking while black", conservatives call them racist for just daring to be critical about police behaviour. Conservatives consider all unionized public workers to be arrogant thieves more interested in their own power than making things better for members... EXCEPT of course when it's police or border patrol - then they are dutyful public servants who risk their lives and deserve nothing but uncritical respect. And if you dare question that narative it's job-loss and ostracising time.
There is nothing more hypocritical than a conservative complaining about "PC" ness. They are pointing long fingers at a behaviour they themselves engage in more frequently, more passionately and with far more power to call upon. They complain about liberals who defend traumatized students right to be forewarned if the material they are about to cover relates to the source of their trauma in order to let these students properly mentally prepare themselves to confront this material and so be able to actually participate in the debate. But then they do a name-and-shame campaign of "professors who teach from a liberal perspective" because conservative students can't stand the idea of being confronted by non-conservative ideas in class. At least one professor on the list, who happens to be female, was written up for "teaching from a female perspective".
I had such awesome fun building stuff with mine. And not the "build this thing" stuff - find a proper, old fashioned, box with 300 pieces you can build anything with. My little one is still a bit small for mecano (even for lego actually - her fingers aren't that nimble yet) but it's definitely on the list for when she's a bit older.
And a little after that, a raspberry pi ! Best thing I had growing up was my own computer I could mess with and learn to code on, I would not deprive her of the same opportunity.
> if using clean energy can be made to actually be significantly cheaper and more convenient
Done and dusted then. Clean energy is already significantly cheaper than fossil energy (solar to coal difference is massive already: solar plant costs per kilowhat hour is now roughly half of what it is for fossil plants), and convenience ? It takes 5 to 7 years to bring a coal plant online, and that's assuming everything happens on schedule - 15 years in practice is not unheard off (and nuclear STARTS there). A typical solar plant of the same capacity takes 2 years to build, and they are almost always on time, require less manpower to maintain and have fewer outages and far fewer safety concerns at every level.
And that's without even considering the hidden costs like the healthcare for all the millions of people who get respiratory illnesses when you build a coal plant in their town.
The trouble is there is ALREADY massive and heavy-handed government intervention: in favour of fossil fuels. Intervention which has proven to be politically almost impossible to be remove since the 'party of small government' and it's ilk around the world abandon all their rhetoric when it comes to defending the donors in that industry from upstart competitors who are cheaper, more reliable and cleaner. The market isn't free and doesn't operate like a free market - so your claims about what a free market would do has no relevance to any discussion about the energy market. Now since we can't get rid of the political influence on one side, the best we can try to achieve is to gain equal or greater political influence on the OTHER side so the two can cancel each other out. Arguably there are good reasons the market isn't free. Fossil fuel production requires massive capital investment with a very low per-unit profit margin, and any economist will tell you that is the definition of a natural monopoly. They always have local monopolies because a market CANNOT exist between them - it's mathematically impossible. So, it's quite sound economics, when you are facing a natural monopoly industry to actually get government involved - since there is going to be a monopoly anyway, you can make it official and extract some good concessions to mitigate the worst effects of that monopoly from consumers.
The problem happens when eventually new technology arrives which changes the numbers. Fossil fuels are not natural monopolies, they can be done on smaller scales, different types can coexist and compete - the initial investment is relatively low. Suddenly there is the possibility of a market that didn't exist for the previous 120 years. But the things done during that 120 years, are proving harder to undo than would be ideal.
You may be right - but it is not relevant to the story at all even if you are since the story is about this particular investment fund which is solely focused on emissions from energy generation. There is no reason we can't have zero emissions in that (much narrower) subfield of human activity.
Which is however such a massive part of total emissions that achieving their goal would likely put us back within the levels of emission that nature can absorb and adapt to with minimal impact on us.
And your mistake is to look at the economic costs in isolation while ignoring the cost in human lives. Just last month a massive avalanche killed loads of innocent people - and that one has been fairly conclusively linked to climate change. Such events will only get more common as glaciers melt.
And you base this on what exactly ? Blind faith ? Considering that for every power plant you could build with fossil fuels a renewable plant will cost less and be done in 2 years rather than 15, and deliver cheaper electricity - that seems unlikely. And those numbers are *right now* - we can expect the price of renewables to drop and keep dropping, there is almost no chance of fossil fuel generators getting cheaper.
Sheer political malfeasance could achieve that outcome - but nothing else could.
Only an insane person (or a politician who took a very big bribe) would replace an aging fossil plant with a new fossil plant today. It makes no economic sense.
They were always there - they just congregated somewhere together.
Why exactly is that a bad thing ? Let them fester in their corner. I'd much rather than them all shitting in a big heap together than leaving their dumps all over everybody else's living room carpets.
The reason for rejecting hate speech in public spaces has nothing to do with changing the minds of hateful people. We KNOW that doesn't work.
The reason to help slow the speed at which those, extremely viral and dangerous, ideas can propagate. These are not ideas we should be tolerant off, or extend the ideology of tolerance to include. The philosopher Karl Popper proved in the 1930s (as NAZI propaganda was peaking) that it's logically impossible to be tolerant of intolerant ideologies - it is literally a self-contradictory position. You are not tolerant of different ideas UNLESS you actively try to suppress intolerant ones.
If you want to argue that point - read Popper's paper BEFORE you do, or I will just rip you apart with quotes, you'd best come up with some counter-arguments first.
A publisher's judgement can frequently be as unreliable as human judgement about anything else. Gone with the wind was rejected by 7 different publishers before one took a shot at it - and it became a bestseller. There are LOTS of examples like that.
Publishers are people, books are assessed by human beings- the assessor must try to determine if people will want to read the book, mostly they have ot base that on whether *they* enjoyed reading it. They can apply some knowledge of literary theory, budgets and ability to take a risk, the reputation of the author etc. etc. etc. but ultimately - that former one is unquantifiable and not always reliable.
But in no case is it censorship. What separates it from censorship is that you are not beholden to the publisher. Nothing stops you from sending your novel to another publisher - or, if you run out of them, to publish it yourself. Even in the days of print-only self-publishing happened frequently and in the day of ebooks it's extremely viable. In fact, a common piece of advice given to young authors on how to get their first manuscript published goes: Send it to a publisher, any publisher. They will probably reject it, but will send back some feedback with it. Edit the manuscript to incorporate their feedback. Then send it to a DIFFERENT publisher. Repeat until you get one that says "Hey, we'd like to run with this but..." That one will get you an editor, work with him until your manuscript is a book.
But what you lot are demanding would be the EXACT OPPOSITE of doing that.
Forcing twitter to let publish speech they dislike is not defending free speech - it's flagrantly trampling on it. Or do you allow every activist in town from BLM to the KKK to come and paint slogans on your living room walls ?
The right to choose who we want to associate with, what speech we want to allow on our personal property, what speech we want to distribute - that is freedom of speech too - and you want to deny that to people.
So what you're saying is... liberals will respect, abide by and defend supreme court decisions EVEN IF THEY DON'T AGREE WITH THEM - and may even come to change their minds in time. Now sure, liberals are still pretty hopeful of overturning citizens united but that is a pretty damn recent finding.
Call me when conservatives stop trying to overturn Roe v Wade and instead just embrace it as the law of the land. As it stands, if history is any indication - the only reason there won't be a lot of people protesting Obergefell in 30 years is because everybody protesting it NOW will be dead.
That's the crux of course, conservative America is literally dying of old age. We don't need to FIGHT the culture war anymore, we can just wait it out. We won the day the youth started thinking gay people should have the same rights as straight people, trans people should be respected and have equal rights... and that anybody who thinks the bible says different is reading it wrong.
65% of the country supports gay marriage, and for under 30's it's close to 80%. The young republicans don't support this shit anymore. They realized that saying they want government 'off our backs' doesn't make sense if they ALSO support government getting 'in your vagina'. They know that Planned Parenthood NEVER does a single abortion with tax money (it would be illegal) and provides thousands of other very needed health services that have nothing to do with the only one that older republicans care about - and how vital these things are.
The liberals have won - because even the conservative young people agree with us on these things.
One day, people will think of those who fought against equal rights for gay people very much the same way you now think about those who fought against abolitionism. Because that is EXACTLY what they are.
Different law, different amendment of the constitution entirely - and already passed supreme court muster (from one of the most notoriously conservative supreme courts of all time actually). Now I'm sure you're about to shout that there hasn't been any case about gay wedding cakes in front of the supremes - and you'd be... wrong because that's not how legal precedent works. The civil rights act was challenged in 1965 - and EVERY SINGLE THING IT SAID - applies EXACTLY the same way to THIS question. A business could not deny service to a person just for being black it said - EVEN THOUGH many people had a religious belief that segregation is mandated by god. The supreme court upheld the law.
The exact same scenario is happening right now - the ONLY thing that's changed is this time it's anti-gay christians rather than anti-black christians who are freaking out about having to love their neighbour.
Maybe he's just pissed because somebody told him taking a dump in the middle of the mall foodcourt was against the law. After all - taking a dump is a perfectly natural biological imperative which everybody (barring a few with colostomy bags) has to do on a regular bases to survive so how dare government regulate where, when and with whom he is allowed to drop a deuce ?
So the whole 'personal responsibility' thing the conservatives are always going on about ONLY applies to poor people or drug addicts or whatever group you currently want to justify not helping (or more usually - going out of your way to screw by voting for somebody who promised to make a law that takes away the things that keep them alive.
It doesn't apply to rightwingers. When people go asshole neo-nazi like the alt-right - somehow that's the fault of progressives ? You do realize that this shit existed long before progressives right ? Kind of makes the "you caused this" thing an obvious piece of bullshit.
No, the ONLY thing that changed this year is that these assholes who HAVE BEEN THERE ALL ALONG - have come out of the woodwork, because Orange Hitler made them feel safe and secure in doing so. They never went away. Hell black people have been telling you how they bump into these people every day and get mistreated by them as a daily life thing for decades ! Just because you were able to pretend they didn't exist anymore, doesn't mean they weren't real.
And nobody has tried to 'feminize' society, absolutely nobody has ever been asked (at least, not by the progressives) to 'act against their biology'. I find it incredibly insulting that you seem to believe that just because I *have* a dick I automatically have to *be* a dick. What has feminists done that's so bad ? They asked you to call out your buddies when they make rape jokes - because that sort of shit make actual rapists feel justified and safe. They asked you to actually *ask* the girl before you touch her privates- and to be a decent enough human being not to take advantage of a drunk woman.
These are not 'against your biology' - it is merely being a decent human being. If you find anything they've asked for excessive- it's not your biology that's the problem, it's the fact that you are a horrible human being and the entire species would benefit from your death.
Well if that is the GPs position I challenge him to come out and admit it and we can debate that argument. Its just dishonest otherwise. The biggest flaw in that argument of course is that the only thing between Bill Gates and a homeless guy with no money is one day of terible luck. And since you are not Bill Gates you need a lot less bad luck. Even if you are sociopathic enough to think that way you should be smart enough to figure out it makes sense to cover the poor in case you join them.
Governments were invented for many purposes. Among them is, as per the US constitution: caring for the general welfare of society. Note its not in an ammendment. Its in the original document itself. So fundamentally a part of the purpose of government that it was obvious to the founding fathers. Not even freedom of thought,speech and religion was that fundamental !
mmm, interesting. But I'm sure you can come up with some scenario where a natural disaster kills them both at once. Congress certainly thought it was possible - which is WHY there is a third-in-line person. Same thing could happen if, say, they both got involved in some major corruption scandal and both of them were impeached.
Actually... you're joke may be somewhat true. Stress is a major contributor to heart disease, and living in a country where mass shootings is a regular occurrence (in fact more regular than ANYWHERE ELSE IN THE WORLD -... actually that's selling it short, TWICE as many in 20 years as the next 10 countries COMBINED) and everybody has a fucking gun, with no real measure to determine if they even know where the safety is, would sure as hell leave ME permanently stressing out.
Trump could piss in a jar, say "Drink my urine to absorb my business power" and his supporters would be lining up to buy it.
And when he gets sued after somebody discovered he stopped pissing in jars after the first one and the rest were just really expensive lemonade they'll call the judge biased against urolagnia.
A general increase in life expectancy over a century has also made alzheimers far more common - as a helluva lot of people live long enough to get it without being killed by something else at 40.
There is no such thing as an abortifacient. No abortifacient birth control has been on sale in decades. And the pill was NEVER one.
If anything the pill PREVENTS abortions. Any sexually active women will naturally abort about 2 out of 3 fertilized eggs - only one in three fertilizations lead to successfull implantation. By preventing the eggs being released in the first place - the pill actually prevents these natural abortions from happening.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah... calling people who are worried about what a fascist tyrant may do "little snowflakes" would be more impressive if the conservatives in America were not the most censorious little snowflakes in the country.
Seriously - there is nobody more easily offended than a conservative. They may rail against political correctness but they have their own brand of it. The major difference is that theirs is not polite and isn't done out of concern for anybody but themselves. Liberal PC tries to keep you from harming vulnerable people. Conservative PC tries to keep you from being appropriately critical of government policy.
Liberals complain if you use the n-word. Conservatives complain if you burn a flag. Liberals just want trans people to be able to pee where they feel most comfortable, conservatives can't stand that but will defend a politician who enjoyed walking in on nude, underage girls in their dressing rooms.
Liberals say "maybe we should stop shooting unarmed people for walking while black", conservatives call them racist for just daring to be critical about police behaviour. Conservatives consider all unionized public workers to be arrogant thieves more interested in their own power than making things better for members... EXCEPT of course when it's police or border patrol - then they are dutyful public servants who risk their lives and deserve nothing but uncritical respect. And if you dare question that narative it's job-loss and ostracising time.
There is nothing more hypocritical than a conservative complaining about "PC" ness. They are pointing long fingers at a behaviour they themselves engage in more frequently, more passionately and with far more power to call upon.
They complain about liberals who defend traumatized students right to be forewarned if the material they are about to cover relates to the source of their trauma in order to let these students properly mentally prepare themselves to confront this material and so be able to actually participate in the debate. But then they do a name-and-shame campaign of "professors who teach from a liberal perspective" because conservative students can't stand the idea of being confronted by non-conservative ideas in class. At least one professor on the list, who happens to be female, was written up for "teaching from a female perspective".
https://www.cato.org/publicati...
You don't get to complain about political correctness until patriotic correctness no longer exists.
And the guys investing a billion dollars in the tech isn't exactly what you just proclaimed to be what's needed?
I had such awesome fun building stuff with mine. And not the "build this thing" stuff - find a proper, old fashioned, box with 300 pieces you can build anything with.
My little one is still a bit small for mecano (even for lego actually - her fingers aren't that nimble yet) but it's definitely on the list for when she's a bit older.
And a little after that, a raspberry pi ! Best thing I had growing up was my own computer I could mess with and learn to code on, I would not deprive her of the same opportunity.
> if using clean energy can be made to actually be significantly cheaper and more convenient
Done and dusted then. Clean energy is already significantly cheaper than fossil energy (solar to coal difference is massive already: solar plant costs per kilowhat hour is now roughly half of what it is for fossil plants), and convenience ? It takes 5 to 7 years to bring a coal plant online, and that's assuming everything happens on schedule - 15 years in practice is not unheard off (and nuclear STARTS there).
A typical solar plant of the same capacity takes 2 years to build, and they are almost always on time, require less manpower to maintain and have fewer outages and far fewer safety concerns at every level.
And that's without even considering the hidden costs like the healthcare for all the millions of people who get respiratory illnesses when you build a coal plant in their town.
The trouble is there is ALREADY massive and heavy-handed government intervention: in favour of fossil fuels. Intervention which has proven to be politically almost impossible to be remove since the 'party of small government' and it's ilk around the world abandon all their rhetoric when it comes to defending the donors in that industry from upstart competitors who are cheaper, more reliable and cleaner. The market isn't free and doesn't operate like a free market - so your claims about what a free market would do has no relevance to any discussion about the energy market.
Now since we can't get rid of the political influence on one side, the best we can try to achieve is to gain equal or greater political influence on the OTHER side so the two can cancel each other out.
Arguably there are good reasons the market isn't free. Fossil fuel production requires massive capital investment with a very low per-unit profit margin, and any economist will tell you that is the definition of a natural monopoly. They always have local monopolies because a market CANNOT exist between them - it's mathematically impossible.
So, it's quite sound economics, when you are facing a natural monopoly industry to actually get government involved - since there is going to be a monopoly anyway, you can make it official and extract some good concessions to mitigate the worst effects of that monopoly from consumers.
The problem happens when eventually new technology arrives which changes the numbers. Fossil fuels are not natural monopolies, they can be done on smaller scales, different types can coexist and compete - the initial investment is relatively low.
Suddenly there is the possibility of a market that didn't exist for the previous 120 years. But the things done during that 120 years, are proving harder to undo than would be ideal.
You may be right - but it is not relevant to the story at all even if you are since the story is about this particular investment fund which is solely focused on emissions from energy generation. There is no reason we can't have zero emissions in that (much narrower) subfield of human activity.
Which is however such a massive part of total emissions that achieving their goal would likely put us back within the levels of emission that nature can absorb and adapt to with minimal impact on us.
And your mistake is to look at the economic costs in isolation while ignoring the cost in human lives. Just last month a massive avalanche killed loads of innocent people - and that one has been fairly conclusively linked to climate change. Such events will only get more common as glaciers melt.
And you base this on what exactly ? Blind faith ?
Considering that for every power plant you could build with fossil fuels a renewable plant will cost less and be done in 2 years rather than 15, and deliver cheaper electricity - that seems unlikely. And those numbers are *right now* - we can expect the price of renewables to drop and keep dropping, there is almost no chance of fossil fuel generators getting cheaper.
Sheer political malfeasance could achieve that outcome - but nothing else could.
Only an insane person (or a politician who took a very big bribe) would replace an aging fossil plant with a new fossil plant today. It makes no economic sense.
Oh Trump drained a swamp allright. Then he took all the aligators that used to live in that swamp and put them in his cabinet.
None of that made there be more of them.
They were always there - they just congregated somewhere together.
Why exactly is that a bad thing ? Let them fester in their corner. I'd much rather than them all shitting in a big heap together than leaving their dumps all over everybody else's living room carpets.
The reason for rejecting hate speech in public spaces has nothing to do with changing the minds of hateful people. We KNOW that doesn't work.
The reason to help slow the speed at which those, extremely viral and dangerous, ideas can propagate. These are not ideas we should be tolerant off, or extend the ideology of tolerance to include. The philosopher Karl Popper proved in the 1930s (as NAZI propaganda was peaking) that it's logically impossible to be tolerant of intolerant ideologies - it is literally a self-contradictory position.
You are not tolerant of different ideas UNLESS you actively try to suppress intolerant ones.
If you want to argue that point - read Popper's paper BEFORE you do, or I will just rip you apart with quotes, you'd best come up with some counter-arguments first.
A publisher's judgement can frequently be as unreliable as human judgement about anything else. Gone with the wind was rejected by 7 different publishers before one took a shot at it - and it became a bestseller.
There are LOTS of examples like that.
Publishers are people, books are assessed by human beings- the assessor must try to determine if people will want to read the book, mostly they have ot base that on whether *they* enjoyed reading it. They can apply some knowledge of literary theory, budgets and ability to take a risk, the reputation of the author etc. etc. etc. but ultimately - that former one is unquantifiable and not always reliable.
But in no case is it censorship. What separates it from censorship is that you are not beholden to the publisher. Nothing stops you from sending your novel to another publisher - or, if you run out of them, to publish it yourself. Even in the days of print-only self-publishing happened frequently and in the day of ebooks it's extremely viable.
In fact, a common piece of advice given to young authors on how to get their first manuscript published goes:
Send it to a publisher, any publisher.
They will probably reject it, but will send back some feedback with it. Edit the manuscript to incorporate their feedback.
Then send it to a DIFFERENT publisher.
Repeat until you get one that says "Hey, we'd like to run with this but..."
That one will get you an editor, work with him until your manuscript is a book.
But what you lot are demanding would be the EXACT OPPOSITE of doing that.
Forcing twitter to let publish speech they dislike is not defending free speech - it's flagrantly trampling on it.
Or do you allow every activist in town from BLM to the KKK to come and paint slogans on your living room walls ?
The right to choose who we want to associate with, what speech we want to allow on our personal property, what speech we want to distribute - that is freedom of speech too - and you want to deny that to people.
So what you're saying is... liberals will respect, abide by and defend supreme court decisions EVEN IF THEY DON'T AGREE WITH THEM - and may even come to change their minds in time.
Now sure, liberals are still pretty hopeful of overturning citizens united but that is a pretty damn recent finding.
Call me when conservatives stop trying to overturn Roe v Wade and instead just embrace it as the law of the land. As it stands, if history is any indication - the only reason there won't be a lot of people protesting Obergefell in 30 years is because everybody protesting it NOW will be dead.
That's the crux of course, conservative America is literally dying of old age. We don't need to FIGHT the culture war anymore, we can just wait it out. We won the day the youth started thinking gay people should have the same rights as straight people, trans people should be respected and have equal rights... and that anybody who thinks the bible says different is reading it wrong.
65% of the country supports gay marriage, and for under 30's it's close to 80%. The young republicans don't support this shit anymore. They realized that saying they want government 'off our backs' doesn't make sense if they ALSO support government getting 'in your vagina'. They know that Planned Parenthood NEVER does a single abortion with tax money (it would be illegal) and provides thousands of other very needed health services that have nothing to do with the only one that older republicans care about - and how vital these things are.
The liberals have won - because even the conservative young people agree with us on these things.
One day, people will think of those who fought against equal rights for gay people very much the same way you now think about those who fought against abolitionism. Because that is EXACTLY what they are.
Different law, different amendment of the constitution entirely - and already passed supreme court muster (from one of the most notoriously conservative supreme courts of all time actually).
Now I'm sure you're about to shout that there hasn't been any case about gay wedding cakes in front of the supremes - and you'd be... wrong because that's not how legal precedent works. The civil rights act was challenged in 1965 - and EVERY SINGLE THING IT SAID - applies EXACTLY the same way to THIS question. A business could not deny service to a person just for being black it said - EVEN THOUGH many people had a religious belief that segregation is mandated by god.
The supreme court upheld the law.
The exact same scenario is happening right now - the ONLY thing that's changed is this time it's anti-gay christians rather than anti-black christians who are freaking out about having to love their neighbour.
Maybe he's just pissed because somebody told him taking a dump in the middle of the mall foodcourt was against the law. After all - taking a dump is a perfectly natural biological imperative which everybody (barring a few with colostomy bags) has to do on a regular bases to survive so how dare government regulate where, when and with whom he is allowed to drop a deuce ?
I'm sorry - if you're going to make a claim of supremacism - you should show some evidence.
"Please stop shooting us when we're unarmed and haven't done anything" is sort of the EXACT OPPOSITE of that.
So the whole 'personal responsibility' thing the conservatives are always going on about ONLY applies to poor people or drug addicts or whatever group you currently want to justify not helping (or more usually - going out of your way to screw by voting for somebody who promised to make a law that takes away the things that keep them alive.
It doesn't apply to rightwingers. When people go asshole neo-nazi like the alt-right - somehow that's the fault of progressives ? You do realize that this shit existed long before progressives right ? Kind of makes the "you caused this" thing an obvious piece of bullshit.
No, the ONLY thing that changed this year is that these assholes who HAVE BEEN THERE ALL ALONG - have come out of the woodwork, because Orange Hitler made them feel safe and secure in doing so. They never went away. Hell black people have been telling you how they bump into these people every day and get mistreated by them as a daily life thing for decades ! Just because you were able to pretend they didn't exist anymore, doesn't mean they weren't real.
And nobody has tried to 'feminize' society, absolutely nobody has ever been asked (at least, not by the progressives) to 'act against their biology'. I find it incredibly insulting that you seem to believe that just because I *have* a dick I automatically have to *be* a dick. What has feminists done that's so bad ? They asked you to call out your buddies when they make rape jokes - because that sort of shit make actual rapists feel justified and safe. They asked you to actually *ask* the girl before you touch her privates- and to be a decent enough human being not to take advantage of a drunk woman.
These are not 'against your biology' - it is merely being a decent human being. If you find anything they've asked for excessive- it's not your biology that's the problem, it's the fact that you are a horrible human being and the entire species would benefit from your death.
Well if that is the GPs position I challenge him to come out and admit it and we can debate that argument. Its just dishonest otherwise.
The biggest flaw in that argument of course is that the only thing between Bill Gates and a homeless guy with no money is one day of terible luck. And since you are not Bill Gates you need a lot less bad luck. Even if you are sociopathic enough to think that way you should be smart enough to figure out it makes sense to cover the poor in case you join them.
Yes I worded that sentence badly. I was trying to say it was highly scientiffic sifi rather than highly speculative.
Governments were invented for many purposes. Among them is, as per the US constitution: caring for the general welfare of society.
Note its not in an ammendment. Its in the original document itself. So fundamentally a part of the purpose of government that it was obvious to the founding fathers. Not even freedom of thought,speech and religion was that fundamental !
mmm, interesting.
But I'm sure you can come up with some scenario where a natural disaster kills them both at once.
Congress certainly thought it was possible - which is WHY there is a third-in-line person. Same thing could happen if, say, they both got involved in some major corruption scandal and both of them were impeached.
We're not.
We're surprized it took this long.
Actually... you're joke may be somewhat true. Stress is a major contributor to heart disease, and living in a country where mass shootings is a regular occurrence (in fact more regular than ANYWHERE ELSE IN THE WORLD -... actually that's selling it short, TWICE as many in 20 years as the next 10 countries COMBINED) and everybody has a fucking gun, with no real measure to determine if they even know where the safety is, would sure as hell leave ME permanently stressing out.
Trump could piss in a jar, say "Drink my urine to absorb my business power" and his supporters would be lining up to buy it.
And when he gets sued after somebody discovered he stopped pissing in jars after the first one and the rest were just really expensive lemonade they'll call the judge biased against urolagnia.
A general increase in life expectancy over a century has also made alzheimers far more common - as a helluva lot of people live long enough to get it without being killed by something else at 40.
There is no such thing as an abortifacient. No abortifacient birth control has been on sale in decades. And the pill was NEVER one.
If anything the pill PREVENTS abortions. Any sexually active women will naturally abort about 2 out of 3 fertilized eggs - only one in three fertilizations lead to successfull implantation. By preventing the eggs being released in the first place - the pill actually prevents these natural abortions from happening.