expshare

I never said that the US went to the Middle East just to kill off kids. In fact I specifically corrected someone else for saying that I said that. Also, pointing out that children were being killed and that this was known and barely discussed is not an appeal to emotions. It's pointing out relevant facts for the question on whether or not the war was justified. You have to take account of the positives and the negatives. I'm putting you on ignore for repeating a misreading of my writings and for telling me that my "appeal to emotion" is not welcome, as if you have some kind of authority over me, and as if I made a fallacious appeal to emotions. I got an A+ in advanced logic and I know how fallacies work. I made none. I'm taking my leave from this forum, as it has turned into a waste of my time and energy that is better spent elsewhere.

I'm trained in mathematics, so when I don't say X, that doesn't mean I said not X. Enjoy your conversations elsewhere, because I'm putting you on ignore for misreading me. Also, America (voters and military) chose a happy medium between lots of dead children and no dead children. That doesn't negate anything I said. They knew they were killing children and continued to do so for the sake of a war that served plenty of political and financial interests. I'm not saying if it was right or wrong. I'm just pointing it out. You can decide in your own heart whether it was justified or not. Maybe that article I put up on casualty estimates is a good starting point. Take the benefits of the war, whatever those were, and see if those costs were "worth it" or not.

Also completely ignoring what someone writes and putting words in their mouth is entirely different. I said they killed children and they knew they were killing children. I never said the military aim was to kill children, but that killing children was an accepted consequence of their military strategies.

I see a country that continued to keep bombing innocent civilians even after knowing that innocent civilians, including children, were dying. That's intentional. You don't drop bombs unintentionally. It's a calculated decision, and the go-ahead was given over and over again despite the costs to life. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military–industrial_complex

The twin towers collapsing isn't exactly a good justification for killing children in another country.

When I was 5 I believed that all important technologies could be developed rapidly by creating machines that would combine the knowledge of people's brains together, because knowing everything that other people know would lead to rapid insights and technology developments. If that sounds unusual then it's because it is...I took an early interest in such matters as a child. It's silly because in reality it would just lead to the development of more aggressive technologies and markets to accelerate the degeneration, power concentration, and despair in society. The only hope is to develop gene drives that create more compassionate and intelligent offspring. Without fixing humanity itself, there is no hope. Unfortunately not enough people are depressed and insightful enough to see the true evils of the world. Most people are haunted by delusions that everything is okay, and those who know that not everything is okay are often too depressed to figure out what the real problems are. They'll blame themselves before they see the systematic ways in which suffering is generated and fueled. Just nearby where I live there was a gathering of people to complain about homelessness. These were multimillionaires complaining that they didn't want to see homeless people in their town. Such is just a tiny microcosm of greater evils that exist. We neglect members of our own species, which is bad enough, but to make matters worse we translate our unconscious biases into conscious biases and judgments that somehow homeless people are to blame for their own conditions. Utterly absurd.

Ice cream is a way to convert pain into pleasure. Not a very efficient way, but a way nonetheless.

I provided a link to a paper that contains a plethora of interesting references on issues of guns and health. Check out reference 53, for instance: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1447364/

Most of the facts are ignored by most people. There are politicians who believe that kids of age 5 with guns will help thwart mass shootings, and in the same brain they believe that banning anyone who is mentally ill from owning a gun is a sensible prevention policy. The blatant disregard for evidence, logic, and truth in American society makes it hard to have a serious conversation publicly. "A number of studies suggest that laws and policies that enable firearm access during emotionally charged moments also seem to correlate with gun violence more strongly than does mental illness alone. Belying Lott’s argument that “more guns” lead to “less crime,”52 Miller et al. found that homicide was more common in areas where household firearms ownership was higher.53 Siegel et al. found that states with high rates of gun ownership had disproportionately high numbers of deaths from firearm-related homicides.54 Webster’s analysis uncovered that the repeal of Missouri’s background check law led to an additional 49 to 68 murders per year,55 and the rate of interpersonal conflicts resolved by fatal shootings jumped by 200% after Florida passed “stand your ground” in 2005.56 Availability of guns is also considered a more predictive factor than is psychiatric diagnosis in many of the 19 000 US completed gun suicides each year.11,57,58 (By comparison, gun-related homicides and suicides fell precipitously, and mass-shootings dropped to zero, when the Australian government passed a series of gun-access restrictions in 1996.59)" from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4318286/

Saying that someone who supports affirmative action must also support white-only universities is a serious error in logic. It shows that you're dismissing alternative sets of principles in which the former is good and the latter is bad. Affirmative action helps to ensure that underprivileged communities receive a better share of doctors, scientists, teachers, social workers, etc.

I like cheap interior design that's practical/effective. Some people like ornamentation and I don't really have an opinion about what is beautiful and what isn't. What's beautiful and what's ugly comes down to brain wiring. Most humans have a rough agreement that something like the ocean is beautiful, but there are usually exceptions to any rule of thumb.

Plan out your strategy carefully, calculate harder, reset if something goes wrong. Use Seth / high level units whenever your other units aren't enough to handle a situation. Throw away bad units, focus on good units. Either look for reputable advice on which characters and classes are worthwhile, or look up the bases/growths/weapons and try to decide for yourself. Have it in your mind to make each turn perfect. Factor in terrain when you form your strategy (try to decide where you would ideally place your units.) Use units who don't want EXP to weaken enemy units so that your units which do want EXP can finish them off. Determine which units will double ahead of time.

I support the right to die for those who are terminally ill or of sufficient ill health. I'm not going to deny that it will make unintentional suicide rates go up a tiny bit, but it's a price that's worth it to give peace and control to a greater number of people. Lowering suicide rates has to be done in other ways, such as by de-stigmatizing mental illness, providing greater access to healthcare, and teaching compassion and understanding in schools.

There's nothing wrong with being a narcissist. Flinging it as an insult is stigmatizing toward those who struggle with it. It's a mental illness, and mental illnesses suck. Most people don't understand that, but there are many who do. Edit: And I've been physically and psychologically abused by a likely narcissist in university, and by a criminal psychopath as a young child, so I am not just saying shit because it's easy for me to say it. Most people don't give a shit...I understand the difference between describing the reality of something and placing blame. By the way, I have no idea if you are a narcissist or not. I'm commenting on the idea that people were using it as an insult.

The right to die for those who are terminally ill or those of sufficient ill health. First paragraph - I agree, and I don't think anyone should be forced into helping people carry out their suicide. I think the job of helping to facilitate a death should be given to those who specifically agree to it. The way it would work is the doctor would set up the means of suicide for the patient, but would leave the actual "pulling of the lever" to the patient themselves. For example, the patient might be given a lethal pill to take, or they might be hooked to a machine that will inject poison when the patient interfaces with the machine to begin the process. Second paragraph - It's definitely not a simple matter. I think a combination of laws and patient/doctor discretion would probably be best to regulate the process of euthanasia. There might be some disagreeable outcomes if euthanasia is legalized, but the hope is that such outcomes would be less common and less disagreeable than the situation currently is, wherein patients have to die of natural causes.