And unfortunately large percentages of the population will never rise to the mental level necessary to find morality without some kind of cultural force to compel them. The higher understanding of why moral societies are better is lost on many - look at how many people twist nietzche into justification for pointless hedonism and self-absorbed existentialism.
I don't disagree with any of this, I would just say that I think humans are capable of rising to that point, but our institutions seem to be aggressively dumbing people down.
American protestantism sits better with you probably because it fits the ideology of the right better - limited power that is easily fixed or ignored when corrupted. Whereas the catholic church is a massive corrupt institution that is essentially unfixable, like any large leftist government.
Yes. I don't really disagree with you on any of this.
There's a big difference between having an event befall you, and fucking causing it.
I never thought of it, but I can scarcely imagine what Trump would have done if he ran for president in 2000 and won. I doubt he would have invaded Iraq, but I'd think Afghanistan would have gone differently, and the level of violence would have been prepared to use would have been fucking startling if the strikes on Syria were any indication.
"Women don't naturally want any of this, it's all a false consciousness induced by The Patriarchy!"
- Says the woman who hasn't been fucked properly in her life because all her boyfriends are male feminists.
This is how we end up with the "stupid, sexy, Trump supporters" meme.
Government contractors having a say in government spending?
IMPOSSIBRU! We can not allow this to happen!
Can you imagine if Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Haliburton, Pfizer, Merck, Johnson & Johnson, Cargil, Blackrock, Blackstone, JP Morgan Chase, Omnigroup, WPP, AT&T, Amazon, Time-Warner, NBC Universal, News Corp, Berkshire Hathaway, Alphabet, HSBC, General Motors, General Electric, Ford, Chrysler, or Monsanto were allowed to dictate US policy?!!
...
I could have sworn we were talking to the Left.
Maybe we were just talking to the Old Left, where all corporations were bad, but now DEI corporations and oligarchs are good.
To be honest, Ron Paul has been getting up there in age and has fought his wars. I'm not sure he immediately want to get into, what would probably amount to, the biggest war in his life where he is personally cutting government budgets.
You and u/Cyberguy64 are dead wrong about game mechanics shouldn't be patentable. That's literally the whole point of a patent. Your complaint about no one doing anything with that patent is legitimate, but the question shouldn't be "why should these be patented", but instead: "why is no one licensing these patents?"
Game mechanics were explicitly created using code, formed from an idea. Arguing against patenting this, is arguing against the nature of patents at all. See Raz0rfist's rant on why abolishing IPs are bad & Socialism.
I'm all for making patent trolling a capital punishment because it is the genuine abuse of the legal system to use fraud to claim that there's something you invented, when in many cases the patent trolls didn't even make anything to begin with, and didn't buy anything from the original creator themselves. But banning game mechanics from being patented would destroy innovation in much the same way it does everywhere else when you end patents on things that aren't game mechanics. Suddenly, everyone would do the same thing that worked once, and no one would be interested on improving that system, because their is no profit incentive to make a new mechanic because the new mechanic would be copied. There's also no logical boundary to stop this from destroying the concept of making new games, because all games are effectively a series of gameplay mechanics that create a gameplay loop.
I'm not unsympathetic to your complaint, Shadow of Mordor's enemy ranking system (I can't remember what it's called now), is also encountering a similar problem. However, I'd argue that what seems to be the problem is that there is a licensing & judiciary issue. It should stand to reason that the software creators are getting more value from literally doing nothing with the property, than there is selling it to others. Now, since one literally generates profit and the other is nothing, that suggests to me that there is some sort of problem with the judiciary. It means that either the government is awarding more money from lawsuits than the company's could get from licensing (meaning the courts are over-valuing damages), or it means the courts are willing to allow for the infringement of patent protections in the event that licensing is taking place (meaning that there's no way to monetize the patent beyond lawsuits).
There's no reason why the creators of any of these systems shouldn't be able to sell a license for other companies to create similar systems. It would both protect their mechanic's patent (as people would recognize that it was theirs), and it would also make them a continual stream of income from each game sold that used their system. That's literally a kind of passive income, which is what every investor loves. So, why the hell wouldn't they be doing it? I suspect that lies entirely with the courts.
He basically started the civil war because he thought he would "solve the issue of slavery" with the Fugitive Slave Act (which guaranteed federal over-reach), and instructed the Chief Justice of SCTOUS to rule in his favor, when it inevitably got hit with a lawsuit. This presidential support is also what allowed SCOTUS to just declare that blacks in America, even the ones who were free, owned property, or were even in political office, were just not considered citizens because something something English law something something, despite England actively ending slavery and having no objection to blacks in England. He additionally did nothing to stop the situation with Bleeding Kansas, and as the secession crisis deepened he neither pushed hard enough towards state's rights to keep the South in the Union, nor did he go hardline with the North, leaving everything entirely up in the air as violence increased. He did nothing to really even keep southern generals in the Union as the crisis worsened. He also presided over a massive bank failure. Oh, and he's famous for being a secret homosexual that took swims in the Potomac.
He was basically infamous at the time for being wrong about almost everything, and blew up the country.
I received a message from a family member who told me her Ukrainian friend was petrified.
Petrified of what? No longer being able to watch men being burned alive in trenches as they are showered with thermite from a horde of attack drones? Shit's gettin' fuckin' real out there. What are you doing to end human misery? Oh that's right, encouraging someone else's kids to get burned alive in a human meat grinder because the US military industrial complex is prepared to sacrifice every single Ukrainian generation from here on out to try and create attrition in the Russian Army before pursuing a major war with them.
How courageous of you. Thank you for your service. Veterans Day couldn't have been the same without you, you know, since you're making so many.
“I am sorry,” he said, “I understand.” Later that night, I briefly glanced at my husband and found myself not wanting to look into the eyes I love. I hated this divide. I wanted to touch his forearms and feel our connection, but I also felt an urge to punish him and deny him my touch.
What a horrible, awful, terrible person you are. What a fucking shit wife you are. You hate Trump more than you will ever love your husband.
Disgusting.
I was surprised he didn’t argue about the change in holiday plans. Normally, it would be a bone of contention because of how close he is to his family. Somewhere inside, he must understand what this election outcome means to me. I know he has empathy for me, for which I am thankful. I will hold onto this like a life raft as I try to figure out how we move forward with our marriage. ... I know he is a good man and he would do anything for a family member or friend, which makes what he has done even more infuriating and even more painful.
"how we move forward with our marriage." Exactly. You're already looking for excuses to leave him. Your marriage was never in trouble. You decided that the father of your children gave you the ick, and we all know how this works. You're going to cheat on him, you'll make excuses, but you won't tell him it's over for another several years.
I will not sit by a Christmas tree celebrating the birth of Jesus and sipping eggnog when I know how many people may now find themselves in grave — even deadly — danger because they cannot get the reproductive care they need. I will not unwrap gifts given to me by people who voted for a party that has talked about building internment camps and mass deportation.
You wanted have a Covid camps, no one has ever been denied mother's-life-saving abortions, and your determination to have your family raped or killed by those criminals we should be deporting is noted. You could try and learn why someone would vote for Trump, but you're too stupid and entitled to think you're wrong.
I will keep encouraging my friends and family to continue to hope and fight for this country.
You hate this country, you always have.
On Nov. 7, I saw my husband’s post was still up. It had more comments from Americans I believe had made a huge mistake two days earlier. I wanted to tell them all that they were wrong and they had no idea of the harm they caused by making that choice — or if they did know, then they should be ashamed of themselves. I don’t know how they can live with themselves.
They love their country more than you love your husband.
He blew me a kiss goodbye from the living room as he sat drinking from his favorite mug, seemingly oblivious to how upset I was. I stood at the door thinking about how I could express my hurt. I wanted to say something that would motivate him to erase his error, but I knew if my words were too demanding, or my voice was too filled with anger, it would get me nowhere. This is a woman’s challenge.
What a horrible woman you are. Men have a responsibility never to let their daughters turn into you.
No, obviously not.
They are just recognizing where they think it's easy to lose ground. If the enemy's attack is going to over-run you; then give ground in order to shorten your supply lines, concentrate your defenses, and make a smaller front to attack from predictable avenues of approach.
The petrodollar is not threatened by fluoride in the water.
It's like being from Chicago.
The point is your from Chicago, not that you stayed there. People are proud that they got the fuck out, and claim they only took the good part with them. (This always remains to be seen).
Explain the wording of the immigration policy of this nation at its founding you filthy fucking liar.
Germans and Catholics were only debatably White.
Is that the definition you are using?
Only in so far as nation and country (and religion too for a while) were synonymous throughout the overwhelming majority of human history.
Absolutely not. Remember, most people lived under monarchies. Nations existed both without states, and between states. Feudalism didn't take nations of people into account. Hell, the Hapsburgs personally owned multiple states, and their subjects were many peoples and many religions. A state was claimed by inheritance from family, not whether or not a nation of people existed from it.
I don't know where my parent comment went.
That being said, I don't think I disagree with what you said.
I disagree with your assessment on anti-theism. I feel like theism is far too easy of a mechanism to basically remove cognitive load and introspection from people onto an authority/institution that gets to exclusively arbitrate truth and morality.
What the American forms of Protestantism do is allow people to take that onto themselves. It's a kind of workaround where you say that God reveals truth and moral righteousness too you. There's problems with that, but it's a hell of a lot better than offloading that to the church.
Well, I think my experience shows the opposite. The existence of a higher power is not natural, and is effectively something that only exists within the human mind as a literary device. Organized religion is just an attempt to continue that abstraction through time, but it is inevitably corrupted. No cultural institution is a final arbiter of truth or morality, and the fact that American Protestantism off-loads most of that onto "God", means it's out of human hands. That's where it's really the only exception to other religions. God not existing is why Protestantism works. You stop letting humans try to manage God through an institution.
But, once you realize you're just offloading it, you realize that some responsibility needs to be taken, which is why it has to be personally taken. But there's only one logical outcome to this: full, personal, responsibility. God simply becomes an irrelevancy once you realize you're the one that needs to make the appropriate decisions and suffer whatever consequences inevitably result.