Somebody_Else

To be fair, if they banned the bots and the Nazis, they wouldn’t have any traffic at all.

Having been a young white dude in the US, ive had all of the various christofascist or conservative terrorism organizations make a pass at me at one point or another.

Turning Point USA was recruiting from my school when I was a senior (right when it was starting up), a couple of the kids at my school were fairly well known for being in the KKK, and they tried to get basically every white kid at the school to come to their events. My college was a fairly small STEM college, so unless the FBI or the CIA count as organized crime, we didnt have a lot. After college the job market was still awful from Bush’s recession, I ended up with a job in a small town where the KKK, the Proud Boys, and the Republican Party held a weekly rally at the towns main intersection and liked to block traffic and generally be a nuisance…but the police chief liked to show up to the rallies (all 3), so you just learned to avoid certain areas on certain days.

If any of that was trustworthy, you might have a point.

Unfortunately, its more likely to just be straight lies than anything pretending to be true

Depends on the person, on the favor etc.

Is this somebody whos a good friend and we just fell out of contact? As long as the favor isnt too bad, id probably do it.

Is this somebody I met at a bar, texted once and never heard from again? id not respond.

Seems fine on the face of it, a vet would be better trained than a standard medic, and probably better at the kind of quick and dirty “make it work” combat care that you need to get back to a full surgeon. Improvising tools for non-standard uses is kind of their whole bread and butter, and patching up a bullet hole is the same regardless of if its in a dog or a person, at least for first-touch care.

The biggest issue I see is that the Army already has trouble getting good, well trained people, and they want to add more attempts?

And given that I am at least capable of walking and chewing gum at the same time, I dont think the test was accurate.

I have.

I have doubts about the veracity of the test however, I got something like a 30 because they changed the numbering on the answer sheet and apparently noticing that is part of the test…

Ive known several MAGA people.

One in particular stands out, she was in charge of processing bills for our company, and she basically got all her propaganda from fox news. The company is/was a civil engineering firm (I no longer work there), we specialized partly in large municipal water projects, dams, water infrastructure, injection wells, large scale stormwater percolation, reservoirs etc.

During the big California wildfires (when firefighters kept not getting water out of the hydrants), the head engineer and the lead technical engineer held one of their once-a-month training lunches, and they decided to go over the California wildfires and the effects on the water infrastructure.

This lady stands up, and interrupts the lead technical engineer (who was going over flow/pressure/friction equations to show why hydrants ran dry when there was so much demand), to insist that the reason California is running out of water is that “Newsom drained the reservoir to protect some stupid fish” and other fox news idiocy. Spent a solid 5 minutes trying to tell a bunch of civil engineers a bunch of “information” about water systems that was so hilariously wrong that it was actually impressive.

That was a very awkward few minutes while HR tried to tell this lady that she needs to let the engineers actually learn how to do the job.

If you havent yet played Portal / Portal 2, together they are about 20 Gigs, and are both very good, genre and generation defining games.

So Trump decided to hold the funds to try and force the governor to let somebody who tried to help him rig the election out of jail so they could do it again?

But…If you read the article she was actually scammed out of a bunch of money too. She even gave the promoter money to cover refunds and they just didn’t refund it. Rocksman (the promoter) is the real villain of the story.

Conservatives always lie.

I mean, it’s messed up all around, but I’ll at least give credit to C.Owens for trying to get people their refunds.

Conservatives always lie

Also I’m not exactly crying over these folks getting fleeced but holy shit it’s crazy what the promoter did and got away with and what they stole.

C Owens is almost certainly in on the scam, but she needs to make herself the victim because conservatives always do

That will pay for cleanup of like, 5 whole acres

That’s particularly ridiculous.

No, its something we learn in first responder training

Babies can drown in 2 inches of water, or people who are completely dependent on others for activities of daily living.

Or anybody who is unable to escape. Somebody who is unconscious, somebody who is trapped,

Suggesting the average person would drown in waist deep water is disingenuous

What’s disingenuous is seeing me say

“Push somebody in the canal, they fall awkwardly and could easily die. Get trapped by a submerged branch, hit your head, get trapped by silt, break a leg etc.”

And then completely ignoring it for a straw man.

Think of everyone you know; would any of them drown if you pushed them in 3 feet of water?|

If they fell awkwardly and hit their head? Easily

A person can drown in 2 inches of water, more or less.

Push somebody in the canal, they fall awkwardly and could easily die. Get trapped by a submerged branch, hit your head, get trapped by silt, break a leg etc.

This is what republicans mean by “protecting women”

Occasionally i hear the phrase “there is no morality outside of human society”. I believe, what is meant by it, is that you cannot say whether something is morally right or wrong in nature, if it isn’t part of human society.

More or less.

It depends on who says it,. but the general idea is that since morality is defined by humans for humans, we cant really apply morality outside of that.

For example, when a turtle eats a bird (here’s a video about it), you cannot say whether these deeds are “good” or “bad”. It’s part of nature, it’s part of the circle of life, … if these things didn’t happen, the bird couldn’t be alive in the first place.

Correct.

Now, i’ve had some interesting talks yesterday with a close friend about what “morality” really means. They very certainly assured me that morality is simply the construct and the set of rules that society uses to organize itself to make itself more successful. In other words, morality aids the fitness of the group, but not necessarily of the individual. Do you agree with this view?

No, this is a really bad “understanding” of morality. Morality is a system of code about behavior which involves evaluative judgments about actions and the people taking them, and specifically about if a behavior is “moral” or “immoral” with “moral” generally equating to “good” and “immoral” generally to “bad”.

To make it simpler, morality is a collective judgement about if something is “good” or “bad” based generally about how a majority of a population can be expected to react.

And if so, would that entail that the beneficial effects to the group can overwrite the wellbeing of a single individual?

By your friends definition, sure.

Where do you draw the limits?

Very very much depends on the population.

Like if some republicans claim that some women cannot decide themselves who they are/should be in a relationship with … does that derive from that view of morality?

Yes, because by the republican judgement, women having a choice is bad.

When you are speaking about morality, you need to clearly define what group is making the judgement.

What do you respond to that?

Its pretty well known that republicans think women having a choice is bad.

I’m seriously wondering because all these discussions make my head spin and sometimes i wonder truly whether i even know anything at all… How can you find certainty in what’s morally acceptable and what is not?

You cant, Morality is subjective, more or less by definition. What is “good” or “bad” will always depend on who you ask.

Some groups like to make lofty claims about how morality is for the greater good, notice how those people never seem to decide that morality decides they should sacrifice for “the greater good,” and how “the greater good” always seems to mean “what’s good for this specific in-group”

She… she plead guilty.

So probably not guilty then

So… 1, 0.99, very high likelihood.

Trumps DOJ targeted her, and she pled guilty.

Both of those things tell me she is very likely not guilty.

This isn’t like an accused street criminal getting basically conned into pleading guilty because the cops planted evidence and got a false witness to make a false testimony.

This is the known to be corrupt FBI (under trump) going after somebody who looks different, for a bogeyman crime that we know they dont actually care about.

This is a person who would not be targeted by that kind of thing and can afford good lawyers.

The DOJ has been very specifically targeting exactly that kind of person. And Republicans dont care about lawyers because they dont care about the law.

She was the mayor.

ok?

So what are the chances she was actually an agent for the Chinese Government? Slightly better than 0? Actually 0?

you have to register as such with the US government.

You very clearly don’t, you just have to be working for Russia and its fine.

Sorta.

If I genuinely cant win an argument because logic and science don’t agree with my position, I should change my position.

If somebody simply insists something is true and refuses to engage with reality, I cant “win” an argument against them, but I also shouldn’t change my position.