All speech is hate-speech if you hate speech

To be fair, everyone’s views are shaped by propaganda of some kind, it’s quite literally unavoidable if you exist within any society. Lots of people like to think that their ideas are just the product of their own independent thinking, but that isn’t really how people work.

Most of the solid bodies in the solar system are literally a bunch of airless, irradiated, toxic rocks, with either no life at all or potentially some rare bacteria-like stuff hidden somewhere we haven’t been able to conclusively examine yet. They already are in a more “fucked up” state than even the most polluted wasteland we’ve created on earth. What could we possibly do to them to mess them up further?

Depends on the time frame. In the period immediately following such a venture, sure, but if you actually properly establish settlement off earth, the total resource base and thus carrying capacity of civilization as a whole increases and continues to increase until we either hit the limits of that part of the universe one can theoretically reach (which is so big as to make the entire earth less than a speck of dust by comparison), you decide to just stop space colonization (which gets more difficult the further on you go, because the number of potential polities to launch a new mission increases the more space is populated), or you find yourself boxed in by alien civilizations in all directions (since we haven’t seen any, they’re most likely far enough apart on average for this to still leave an extremely vast chunk of space). A hypothetical spacefairing civilization should be able to reach sizes so vast that it would be physically impossible to create enough jobs on just one planet to equal it, even with just this solar system even.

Job creation by itself is not exactly the best motivation to pursue this though, since the jobs created will after the initial period be generally far away and therefore not likely to be worked by anyone except the people that end up in those colonies, who wouldn’t even exist otherwise.

I used to love grapefruit, more than any other citrus fruit. Then I learned about pomelos. I still generally like grapefruit, but don’t get them so much anymore because they always seem vaguely disappointing by comparison.

The trouble is, the people doing the studies and the people in charge of deciding where public money is spent and acquired, are different groups.

If a person talks to another person in person and there’s no recording device around to capture the conversation, then that conversation is just as invisible to the government as an encrypted message is, and such communication has been used to facilitate crime since the invention of laws to break. By the same arguments one could use to argue for a ban on encrypted messaging, could one not also argue that it should be illegal to talk to another person without a government-acessable recording device in use?

Plot twist; they cancelled because their convention had to be rescheduled due to unforeseen circumstances.

Surely that’d depend on the Muslim? Like, Islam is a very large religion and religious people rarely follow or consider valid all their stated rules to the letter, and disagree with eachother over the interpretation of those they do. I don’t know what exactly the Koran says on the matter, but given the terminology and understanding around gender (and available technology for transition) has changed a fair bit since the time it was written, I’d be fairly surprised if it said anything as clear as “you must not be trans” that didn’t leave room for interpretation and disagreement.

Given the skin tone and sunglasses, one could put that picture of the suspect they’re looking for in there and see if anyone notices

I’ve seen this sentiment around a bit, and while I’m not going to tell people their feelings are wrong (I did not like the guy and while I would have preferred something else happen to him over murder, he did help support the set of circumstances that made his assassination possible), I find it confusing enough that it makes me question if either my brain works differently around this or if I’m misunderstanding what feeling empathy actually refers to, because to me, it doesn’t seem “voluntary” like that.

Like, for me, if something unpleasant happens to someone, I can’t really help but to start imagining it and going over what it might be like to be in or around that position and getting emotionally worked up, pretty much automatically. It doesn’t really even matter if I’m glad the guy is gone at some level or hated them, my brain gets the immediate gut twist of “damn, that seems like a horrible experience” all the same. Like, it could be someone as heinous as literal Hitler, and even then if some documentary gets into the details of his end my first gut reaction is likely to be a sense of discomfort and something like “it would really suck to wake up one day as someone that’s done all that and brought themselves to such a position, imagine what would be going through your head in that situation”.

I haven’t watched the video as I don’t handle blood and gore and such well, and I don’t mean this as some kind of judgement or assertion of virtue, it’s just a bit confusing to me when people say things like “I have no empathy for guys like that” or “you shouldn’t feel empathy for fascists because they don’t deserve it” and I’m like, okay, but how? Does your brain just let you decide not do that? Mine seems to just do it automatically regardless of if it feels appropriate or not.

The reason that I just can’t take that idea seriously is that, well, there at least was someone actually shooting, so if it was faked the way they would have to do it would be along the lines of “shooting at Trump, but intentionally missing”. That would be a fairly dangerous move though, if your fake shooter’s aim was off, there’s the risk that it accidentally becomes a real assassination instead, and that level of risk feels out of character for Trump.

Further, were it staged, I’d expect it to be designed to advantage Trump as much as possible. Surely the “shooter” would be revealed to be one of the many demographics he riles people up against, or at least an outspoken democrat, and surely they would have played it up as much as possible throughout the election instead of having it done well before the final weeks and letting it get buried by the news cycle before people actually went to the polls.

He also surrounds himself with loyal but often incompetent people, and is an old man prone to saying embarrassing things. Would he really have been able to keep such a fake a secret even for this long?

Kinda looks like a kiwi tbh

I don’t imagine that would be enough time for someone to even process the various stimuli enough to realize that what just happened was a gunshot, tbh, let alone consider the implications of that.

Assuming the time wasn’t an exaggeration that is, I’m fairly squeamish so I don’t think I’ll be watching that video to see how long it really was.

They do that anyway tbh, it’s not like they’ll just be nice if nothing ever happens during their time in power

The only instance that I’m banned on (at least as far as I’m aware of, I don’t think you actually get notifications for that so maybe there’s more I don’t know about) I just asked an admin of if I could request a ban, where does that fit?

To be fair, I don’t think I’ve seen most geoengineering techniques, especially the sulfur reflective particles one, presented as not being ecologically disastrous (though the particular damage I’ve previously seen it suggested as likely to cause was different). I’ve usually seen that presented in a “thing to consider if the consequences of warming becomes worse than the consequences of simulating a long term volcanic winter” context, in which case, pointing out that these ideas cause other damage and that their effect isn’t to just revert the climate to what it was isn’t really “debunking” them, it’s just presenting a better picture of what the potential costs and benefits actually are.

Using it to claim that all states are and must be equally authoritarian, as a way to deflect criticism of authoritarians in a specific country, somewhat destroys the truth value of it. It’s like claiming that all substances are toxic; technically true, too much of literally any substance will kill you, but if I then tell someone that because water and cyanide both have a lethal dose, it doesn’t matter which they take because both are potentially deadly, I’d be attempting to deceive and therefore lying even if I use only technically true statements to imply a false conclusion.

I don’t know the reason behind this whole deal as I don’t follow nepali politics, so I’ve got no idea if there are fascists in Nepal or not, but the presence of fascists in the west does not imply that politicians outside of the west must or cannot be fascists. The world doesn’t work in such a way that there must be exactly one group of them out there such that everyone not aligned to them cannot be one.

As an asexual atheist with both grandmothers still alive, I can’t say I ever have, no. Were those things not the case, I’d say anything they saw would be down to them using their ghost powers to violate my privacy anyway.