Defeatist Elitist

I want to live in a country where people aren't afraid to go to the hospital when they really should because they can't afford it. Luckily I do. I don't believe giving the government a bit of power is an inherently bad thing, and more importantly, actual facts about actual countries suggest that it isn't. Welfare states of a degree further than you suggest both exist and function. Take health care as an example. It is incredibly difficult to agree on what is or isn't good, and I don't want to devolve into semantics, so I'll define what I'm talking about first. To me, a good healthcare system is one that guarantees quality care at an affordable rate to everybody in a society. If you accept that definition (maybe you don't), then the most "left wing", "welfare state" style healthcare systems are among the best in the world. Certainly, the general left side is much better than the general right side. You can argue that all of the real world right wing examples aren't truely free market solutions and that a real free market solution would work out fine, and I would disagree, but that barely even matters. As it stands we have no example of it, but we know the left wing system exists and works. Canada's health care system isn't perfect, but literally nothing is, and you appear to be arguing that providing everybody in a country with health care they need and are guaranteed to be able to afford is an actively bad thing. Why?

You're right that I was mocking you, but not about wasting time!

whatthechrist I don't remember saying any of those words.

We've got a regular fucking Sherlock Holmes here people.

edit: also twitter is the fucking shit, what the fuck is wrong with you people get on it right now

It's like you guys have never heard of _txt Twitter account before.

Well you're pretty much the best SF member anyway, so don't sweat it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVC2cszdTao

I can't believe the media portrayed this shooting of an unarmed teenager as if it might have been unjust.

I agree. I guess I just don't think it necessarily needed to be said.

Okay, so I guess we agree on that then. I don't think insulting is the most effective way to get people to agree with you either. I do think however that it is part of one effective method that should be employed in certain situations. I also am pretty much positive that that won't be the greater outcome.

Yeah, I don't really see what your argument is. Obviously being a fuckwit is probably bad. You seem to be saying that insulting someone for any reason is being a fuckwit. If insulting people for being homophobic reduced overall homophobia, would you still have a problem with it? You seem to think it doesn't, I think it does. If you wouldn't have a problem with it, then our argument is about whether it's effective. If you would still have a problem with it than I have no idea what to tell you.

Yes, as I've said before, maybe discussing why that person feels that way will help change things. I've found most of the time I take that route I find that either the person is unwilling to give the actual reason they feel that way, or they don't have a real reason. I then find they refuse to change their mind no matter how reasonably I try to argue with them. I am perfectly willing to accept that in some cases your method will work, and in fact, I still try to use it for a lot of shit. However, I also know for certain that the other method works as well sometimes, and in certain situations I think it's the better option. Either way, your argument isn't "you're just as bad either way", what you're arguing is "homophobes are bad people, people who insult homophobes just aren't going to effectively change their mind", am I right? edit: Like, you seriously underestimate the effectiveness of assertive dissaproval of something.

I guess I just don't interpret that statement remotely the same way. Basically, my point is this: if somebody says "I don't think niggers should be allowed to vote", you would not be out of line to tell them they were being a racist prick. The fact that people will do stuff like this means racism is less prevalent. I mean, say what you like, but making something socially unnacceptable tends to decrease its occurence. By the same token, if somebody says "I don't think fags should be allowed to marry", and you call them a homophobic asshole, you're not out of line. If we all did that, there would be far fewer homophobic people, because homophobia would have become completely socially unnacceptable. Edit; There is a fairly constant effort by people to make everything balanced when it really doesn't need to be. Evolution happened, creationists do not have equal credibility to scientists. Vaccines work, alternative medicine quacks are not just as good as doctors. And fervent same sex marriage supporters are not just as bad as the Westboro Baptist Church. Both sides don't have to be equally bad. The world does not work like that. Sometimes one side is actually just right. Now, obviously, gay marriage is a morality issue, and all morality is subjective, but hey. The truth is not always somewhere in the middle.

Except literally nobody is saying it's an excuse to yell shit like that in front of a group of strangers. See my point about basic social interaction skills. If somebody is against gay marriage I'm not going to flip my shit at them in public, but I am going to explain to them why they're wrong and why they shouldn't say shit like that. On the other hand, if somebody is harrassing somebody for being gay or whatever, I think it's perfectly acceptable to tell them to fuck off. There's a good chance I wouldn't do it because I'm a huge coward who would be afraid of the negative social repurcussions of doing it, but a better person than me would do it. Yeah, I said "I", but I guess my point is that your base assumption shouldn't be "human beings don't understand human interaction". I didn't see it as a direct attack on me or anything. Also, again, I don't think you meant it as an attack. What I'm trying to do is point out that what you said IS sort of an attack whether you meant it or not. edit: It's just sort of a pet peeve of mine, like when people say "that's just your opinion". I know it's meant in one way, but the implication is sort of bizarre, and it doesn't contribute anything because it's pretty obvious.

So just to nip this in the bud, since people are still talking about it, as far as I know there isn't a single place where gay marriage has been legalized where churches have been forced to marry homosexual couples. I mean, for all I know there could be, but it's not even remotely likely to happen in the US, so it's not really relevent to the legalization of same sex marriage in the US.

I don't think we're suggesting anybody start a campaign of hatred against homophobes. What we're suggesting is that when people do homophobic shit, they get called out for it and people explain that it's unnacceptable, just as people should do for racist shit, or sexist shit. I'm not saying you should deny them services or treat them badly, I'm literally just saying you should make it clear that you don't respect their opinion on the subject. You don't have to say you don't respect them, I think you should respect everyone, but I don't think every opinion should be respected. I mean, the fact that you consider that hurling insults is one thing, but even if it was, you must understand their is a key difference there. One is harrassing somebody because they're doing something that has no negative affect on anyone else, and the other is reprimanding someone for doing something socially destructive. There is a difference between the two.

I think it's fundamentally misunderstanding what a church is, but I don't think it's absurd.

I always let people have their say, it's actually pretty difficult not to. In fact, I usually try to start with tact. I mean, I am a human being. I know how to communicate with other human beings. I don't think any of us here spend all our lives yelling at everybody who disagrees with us on anything. Please don't post telling us how to conduct basic human interaction, I'm pretty sure we've got that covered. edit: I get where you're coming from, because yes you are partially right, but I just find it odd you immediately assume that I have no grasp of how to effectively communicate with other human beings.

So are you being sarcastic or what? I mean, I don't actually think churches should be forced to conduct any marriages they don't want to, but the parallel you seem to be trying to construct is pretty absurd.

But when you do that, you absolutely run the risk of tacitly supporting their bigotry. I mean, I know coming from me this is going to sound old, and nobody is going to take it seriously, but straight up being nice to people won't always help. I have friends and people I am nice to who believe awful things, and not a single one of them has changed their horrible horrible opinions. On the other hand, of the people I've been far more aggressive with, I've seen far more success. I am at a point in my life where I actually consider terminating friendships I have had for years because those friends refuse to change their sexist, racist, homophobic, etc beliefs, even on a fairly minor level, because in many cases I can't change peoples' minds by being nice. Now this is not to say it can't be done. It might even be just as good as being aggressive. The point is, making it clear that horrible opinions are not acceptable to you does actually work to discourage horrible opinions. I guess it depends on what you mean by shitting on though. Regardless though, if you can't see the difference between calling somebody a fag for being gay, and calling someone a homophobic asshole for doing that, I don't know what to tell you.

also, fuck the police

You're wrong. If you've looked into this, you would know there is more than enough evidence to support evolution. The overwhelming majority of scientists, and pretty much all biologists accept it. You might think there isn't any evidence, but almost everybody who's literal job it is to figure things out and interpret evidence say there is enough evidence. Your ignorance on this topic is not as good as their knowledge. If you want evidence, there is evidence in the fossil record, their is evidence in the morphology of a number of extant species, and there is a ton of genetic evidence, just to name a bit of stuff. I wasn't kidding when I said nothing in modern biology makes sense without evolution. Denying evolution is tantamount to saying that all of biology since it's acceptance is either a) wrong, or b) right completely by accident. It's also pretty similar to saying all science is wrong. If you're worried that this fucks with your religion, that should be flexible enough to contain it, and the important part of religion is supposed to be the personal and faith aspects of it right? Oh, and to eclipse on her second point, fuck Zoroastrianism, that shit is dumbdumbdumb.

So have I. But the ones it works on, it will still work on by doing that. There are fucking people on this site who were once creationists who aren't because other people here convinced them otherwise, and none of us were nice about it. Call it bullying if you'd like, but I think it should be socially unacceptable to say shit like that, and I'm doing what I can to foster that kind of atmosphere. If you treat him nicely and as if his opinions have merit, he'll say a bunch of disingenuous shit, and you make what he's saying seem reasonable. He is literally denying one of the most basic, well accepted and central biological facts. Modern biology makes no sense without evolution. He cannot possibly have actually looked at any of the science and still hold the opinion he has. If he's going to spout off a bunch of shit about something he doesn't understand and hasn't even put in any effort to understand, at best he's being a willfully ignorant anti-intellectual, an at worst he's a straight up liar. Fuck him man, he doesn't deserve your suppport.