Give me something juicy
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The US isn’t the great Satan, they are quite contemporary satan. Russia, China and Iran are all imperialist, anti democratic and have even worse human rights violations.
You don’t have to pick a side, these are all asshats, some more than other though.
Sunny weather fucking sucks. Overcast is by far the best weather. You don’t have to deal with sun in your eyes, or glare or feeling like your skin is burning after 30 minutes of standing outside. You can still see everything just fine.
I got to live in San Francisco for a few years and going outside to 10 C cloudy, foggy or overcast weather (almost) everyday was amazing. It was literally the most perfect weather I have ever experienced and the only thing I miss about that city.
Apparently saying new Star Trek is trash writing is enough to get banned from certain instances.
It is, though.
Plastic straw pollution doesn’t have a measurable impact on the environment.
The entire thing about banning plastic straws comes from some high schooler using back-of-a-napkin math to guess how many straws are in the ocean in what was clearly a successful attempt at starting a science fair project the night before it was due. Some news station picked it up, and then a bunch of science-illiterates ran away with it.
You can’t determine the impact of pollution by count. Straws are tiny and weigh almost nothing. If you skip buying one pair of sneakers in your life, then you’ve successfully reduced your plastic use by almost a lifetime of plastic straws.
Removing plastic straws is probably the single least impactful way to reduce plastic pollution. It’s pure virtue signaling: it’s about presenting an image of being environmentally conscious while doing effectively nothing to help the environment.
Yes, but I don’t think this is particularly controversial, perhaps just not widely known.
I think it’s more of the same strategy from polluters - privatise profits and socialise detriments.
If a government says to plastic producers “what can we do to help you minimise use of plastic” answers like “make straws and shopping bags illegal” are of course in their favor. They don’t cost producers anything to implement, and they make consumers feel like they’ve already done the “hard work” of solving plastic waste.
Of course a much better approach would be to tax products that include any kind of plastic, as that would have a meaningful impact but would ultimately cost producers as they pivot to other materials.
I’d like to up you one on this and include the EU law requiring soda caps are tethered to bottles.
From the link:
The European Commission estimated that plastic caps and lids represented around 13 per cent of plastic marine litter caught in the nets of fishing vessels between 2011 and 2017.
I don’t understand where this number comes from, but it seems suspicious. Does the mean people properly throw the bottle away and just say, “meh, I’ll go out of my way to throw the just the cap into the ocean” or does the bottle “breakdown” (into microplastics) at a different rate than the cap? If so, then having them tethered won’t change anything, right? Or maybe this is just some “feel good number” to make government officials feel like “their making meaningful change”, without actually changing anything.
You should always look in the oven before turning it on.
Seems simple to me. Before making the oven hot, make sure there’s nothing in there you don’t want to get hot (and that the racks are in the right place.) Takes maybe a second.
But a lot of people seem to find the idea that they (or anyone in their household) would ever leave something in the oven, when not cooking, to be deeply offensive.
I don’t mean harm but this reminds me of the political compass and centrists who just want to grill. Like, if this is your most controversial opinion lol
I had an American guest over in Denmark, where he offered to cook. Her turned the oven on with all the trays inside, and then went on an angry rant that those should never be stored in the oven. It’s my house, my rules, mother fucker!
Apartments and big cities are hell. People shouldn’t be shoved together like sardines.
Agreed on it being a hell. People shouldn’t be shoved together too, but thing is that they chose to.
You’re probably exactly right for the places you’re thinking of, but neither of those things have to be hell. Apartments originally were spacious places like the home-sized ones, the justification for their existence being that you get to live in the city centre rather than that being the only selling point.
If you want to see good examples of big cities with nice levels of public space, look at urban design in south korea and china
What do you do when your population outpaces your land mass?
Ranked voting. Fined heavily if you don’t. Politicians need to reveal their donors and sponsorships and lobbyists at the start of every speech like a YouTube reviewer does when they receive something for free. We shouldn’t need sites that reveal who is owned by AIPAC, etc.
OP asked for the most controversial. You listed a few. Which do you think is most controversial?
Forget ranked voting.
This suffers from low explainability, so score voting is better imo.
Interesting. Will read up on this.
We are breeding idiots.
A lot to unpack here, but the primary reason is that “everyone” survives, is led into adulthood, and encouraged to start a family. From an evolutionary standpoint, we don’t have any sort of filter who gets to live and breed, and no “survival of the fittest”. This is not only about childbirths, but also about who breeds (and raises) children.
Eugenics is not bad in of itself, but people consider it bad because they fear it will be forced upon them by racist/ableist powers. (Remember, a mother (and father) who chooses to abort if there is something bad unveiled through tests are also doing eugenics.)
Not saying we haven’t had this “problem” in the past, nor that we have to do something about it. It’s more a statement that we have a lot of idiots around…
“Survival of the fittest” isn’t that only the fittest survive and reproduce–it’s that they reproduce the most successfully, thus passing their genes on more than others do. This has both positive and negative consequences because there’s nothing smart about natural selection.
It’s also worth noting that what traits are important for survival change. Unfortunately, being a sociopath with no physical or mental fitness could be the most beneficial traits as far as production goes.
Evolution is neutral.
It’s funny cuz Conversely I’m currently idealizing life is not life but a form of hell.
If you’re under the belief you’re not the idiot to be here then you’re the tourist in idiot territory.
Or perhaps you Thinking you belong here and that they should die and leave you alone means you’re the demon maintaining hell.
Additionally I think we’re all idiots. We all have our moments. We all get to die at some point.
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.
Sure, but if you’re gonna claim that trans people having either binary gender identity is necessarily conformity to gender stereotypes, then you need to accept that a cis person being either a man or a woman is even more so.
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.
I don’t fully understand. Can you give a concrete example? Like you meet someone who seems like a woman to you, they say they’re a man, and you’re like, “no, no, you’re a woman, I reject your self identification of being a man”?
I don’t see you as less of a person, I don’t see you as a bother, I don’t see you as challenging to my views or, a shock at all, really.
I guess the cold hard truth is that I just don’t care.
If you wear your gender as your first, most outstanding personality trait, it doesn’t speak much for the rest of you.
Do I care if you keep it up, don’t stop and tell everyone you know? Have at it.
It’s just not my business. It’s not important in the grand scheme of whether or not you’re an asshole. Your shoe size is more indicative of who you are, to me, anyway.
Huh. I was going to write my own reply but I will defer to your argument, it perfectly encapsulates how I see it too, no notes.
Do you just never use gendered language in real life?
I don’t think about it. I don’t understand the question, honestly. I see people as men or women, short or tall, blue eyed or brown eyed, they come they go. It’s not important to me how they see themselves, it doesn’t interfere with my daily business or interactions with people, I try my best to treat everybody with respect and mind my own business. They can think they’re the Queen of England for all I care.
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 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.
Okay so i haven’t read against democracy but it seems to take the socrates position. Instead of limiting votes to only the highly educated (which i take as an issue because this disadvantages the poor significantly due to higher education costing lots of money) why not just build a society in which everyone is educated enough to meet the standard for an informed voting population?
Firstly, I don’t agree with anyone in this chain, but man… there are just some people who damn near physically incapable of learning.
There’s also the simple fact that a huge portion of the population just don’t care about politics or government. If “didn’t vote” was an option for eligible voters, it would have won every election in US history.
The great thing about representative democracy is that idiots don’t actually vote for anything. They only vote for whom to represent them.
I’ll admit, I’m somewhat of an ignorant idiot myself. I haven’t read nor understood the entirety of all laws. That’s why I choose someone else to represent me.
I think it’s only fair that mentally handicapped people are also allowed to choose someone to speak their case.
The problem in US isn’t the idiots. It’s the two party system. In countries with multiple parties, truly idiotic votes would be scattered randomly all over different parties, or they would be placed on the party that represents idiots the best.
That doesn’t work in US, because you actually only have one political party and then the opposition. It’s really easy for an opposition to trick idiots into voting against everything.
I see the fact that most people don’t care about politics, government, or learning as a symptom of our system of social organization rather than something inherent to humanity
Yeah this is a good one.
I agree that the majority of the populace chooses how to cast their vote based on limited information, overwhelming biases, and erroneous misconceptions.
However, I don’t know that there’s a better more equitable alternative? I’ll have to read Against Democracy, for sure.
mandatory voting is better than any sort of voter controls, the catch is you also have to combine it with a properly funded/structured public education system designed to grow well rounded individuals capable of critical thought (instead of mindless factory drones, like the US’s).
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.
Somewhere around the majority of people employed in academia are absolutely useless.
I say this as an academic.
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
it was all dick measuring contests and covert social signalling
this exists in most professions.
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.
It aint just academia.
Armor-piercing ammunition should never be banned.
Same goes for armor and suppressors.
Hmm, why do you believe that then? So that people can defend themselves against the police better?
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.
It’s more of a question of what is healthy psychologically. Staying to close to one group socially makes a sort of echo chamber, and that’s always a problem.
And that’s what I mean with “weird shit”, things like racism are quite known to be increased in people that are not in contact with people of color for example. Echo chambers are generally bad, and I feel like this would create a very strong one (“us against the world” and whatnot)
DNA doesn’t matter when it comes to kids if you don’t have a background thought that is at least a bit problematic. It’s not about what matters to them only, but also about what is morally wrong. This “DNA is everything” thing is extremely toxic
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?
Not the person you asked, but you and everyone reading your comment know that’s not a good faith argument.
The reason incest is frowned upon and often illegal is because of the danger it poses to any potential offspring. Many genetic diseases rely on recessive traits that require both parents to carry the recessive trait in order for it to be exposed. If two biological siblings have a child, that child would therefore have a massive amount of recessive traits exposed since both parents would share a massive amount of DNA
At a population scale, genetic diversity is critical to survival of a population, and a collapse of genetic diversity through too much inbreeding tends to lead to a very unhealthy population that can be easily wiped out through disease. This is much less of a risk with random incest today thanks to how much humans move around these days, but the flip side is that there is some risk of this from so called “super surrogates” who have genetically fathered hundreds or thousands of kids. The likelyhood of these kids meeting and reproducing can be quite high, which can therefore noticably reduce genetic diversity in a population, and ultimately reduce the health of a population
I think it is a very topical argument- mind you I am genuinely not taking a position, I am exploring the logical consequences of the argument. There are pitfalls in the line or reasoning going on the argument that they are making. This is how philosophical discourse works. It’s how arguments and logic works. Being emotional about it is fine, but it’s not conducive to exploring the consequences of the argument.
The reason incest is frowned upon and often illegal is because of the danger it poses to any potential offspring.
The purely hypothetical counter argument here would be that what constitutes a “defect” or “danger” is highly subjective and prone to abuse. Where do we draw the line? Either there is no line and anyone can freely breed offspring, or we are in dangerous territory where we are determining which qualities we as a society deem “unwanted”. What do we mean by “defect”? What do we mean by “unwanted”?
At a population scale, genetic diversity is critical to survival of a population, and a collapse of genetic diversity through too much inbreeding tends to lead to a very unhealthy population
Well that is an argument from utility. Who is to say that people must subject themselves to the “critical survival of a population”? What if people don’t care? If they refused to, what would we do? Force them not to breed, by, say sterilizing them? Surely you see the issue here.
I wouldn’t call the argument a bad faith argument. Perhaps there is a line somewhere, but ultimately, his argument is that “two people who have an increased chance of passing on genetic disorders can’t have children/have a relationship”.
For most people, when asked this question outside of the incest framing, would argue that the state has no role to dictate that line. The slope is too slippery and screams too much like eugenics. It’s only within the social taboo of incest do people think that argument is acceptable.
I see what you’re trying to do here and I don’t like it
That’s ok. You don’t have to like what other people think. I don’t always like what other people think either. But it’s good to challenge and think through ones positions, I think everyone benefits from that. I think it’s critical, in fact.
(great thread BTW!)
Human beings should stop reproducing and walk towards extinction, we’ve done enough and irreparable damage to the nature
Any animal with the ability to dominate the globe as we do would do the same. So why single us out? We are part of nature. Even if we died off, intelligence would evolve again and then what? We make way for cockroach people to make the planet unlivable for all other species?
This degree of nihilism doesn’t impress me. I mean it’s not even an ethos!
