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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • I see what you’re getting at, but I think ‘moral high ground’ might not be the phrase you’re looking for.

    Laws and morals are explicitly different. That’s why juries exist, so that a law may be put against the morals of a situation and the morals may prevail if need be.

    Breaking the law isn’t necessarily immoral. It’s just illegal. So it isn’t like someone breaking the law is seeking to take the moral high ground in the first place, nor does that mean that someone who only ever follows the law always has the moral high ground. Lawful-evil does exist.


  • Forced labor and slavery aren’t really different in the context of the state owning people. That’s why it’s phrased like that in the constitution. Once you are found guilty of a crime in the US, you lose many of your rights and are considered a prisoner of the state or federal government.

    It’s actually a hot topic in the US anyway, because the government very often assigns its prisoners it privately owned, for-profit prisons, where those prisoners labor for pennies and have no choice. Here’s an example for you.

    Is it involuntary servitude or slavery when the state hands you off to a private prison to make them money?

    Couple that with the fact that the US coincidentally has the highest incarceration rate in the world (not crime, just the act of putting people in prison) and the fact that private prisons very often sign contracts with the states for a minimum number of prisoners a year, and you can see that it might be argued that private prisons collaborate with the government as an institutional system to keep certain Americans in prisons.

    And then there’s the fact that poor and non-white people are disproportionately preyed on by police, maybe you could say that modern day slavery still exists.

    Involuntary servitude might be morally ok, but there’s still a line where it crosses into slavery and we’ve been on the slavery side for a long time now.


  • To expand for a non-American who still may not understand the context:

    The 13th amendment abolishes slavery in the US, where slavery at the time (prior to 1865) was based on the notion in the southern states that you could and should be owned as a slave if you were black. That included lifelong servitude of you and your children, any punishment deemed appropriate including severe physical punishments, and murder without consequence. Even if you were a free black man, and not shipped in from Africa like the majority of slaves, you could be captured by police and auctioned to someone to work on their plantation.

    The 14th amendment establishes primarily that all persons in the US are equal regardless of the color of their skin. The bloodiest war in US history (Civil War, 1861-1865) was fought over the right for the southern states to declare it legal to own slaves, vs the northern states wanting slavery abolished federally. These amendments were ratified after the north won. Even after the war, it took another hundred years before Americans as a whole saw non-white people as equal. This and the next amendment were very much necessary to protect the newly found rights of former slaves.

    The 15th, at least, is self explanatory.

    The point of this meme is literally positing that it’s ok to make black people slaves again if other parts of the constitution can change, because they’re pretty boldly racist. There’s not much else to it.




  • Let’s go a step further and analyze exactly what this graph is saying:

    There’s only about a 20% distribution difference in the “never” sections between Christians and atheists. So on average, 4/5 atheists would answer the exact same as Christians. All this graph says is that Christians are barely more tolerant than people who identify as atheist. Barely is the key word. If anything, this graph proves that tolerance levels don’t fluctuate that much for the individual between differing religions.

    But Bible thumpers need any win they can get, so they don’t read the data for what it is, they just see one bar longer than the other and declare victory.




  • The first step is to make it illegal to sideload “illegal” apps. It’s the step that sounds reasonable that less informed people might agree with or at least not protest. The next step is to arbitrarily decide what makes an app illegal. By that point, it’s too late to protest the actual law.

    It’s like the law in Florida making the punishment death for sexual assault on a child. That sounds fine until you realize that their legislature has announced their intent to make wearing clothes opposite your gender in public into sexual assault on a child.

    Unilateral restrictive laws, without specific stipulations or conditions, even innocent sounding ones like this, are one bad actor away from being changed to a political weapon.


  • I’m not sure if you’re talking about the left on a world wide scale, but in America I really don’t think it’s fair to say that the left is the side limiting free speech. Sure, they may paint the use of certain words as distasteful, but that’s basically the extent. Leftists don’t even tend to get the law involved outside of defining what may or may not be hate speech.

    On the other side of the aisle, the right wing party is promoting book bans and firing teachers they disagree with. Several states have a version of the “don’t say gay” bill that literally prohibits teachers from explaining why one student has two dads, and a similar bill that prohibits institutions from simply acknowledging a kid’s preferred name. Texas and Florida are defunding colleges with curriculums they as a party don’t like. Louisiana (along with a few other states) passed a bill requiring you to prove who you are with state ID before you can view something they deem inappropriate.

    All of those things are actual examples of infringing the concept of free speech. Does the left do anything remotely like those things?





  • If you can’t learn how to talk to people, you’ll spend your days shouting into a void and wondering why people don’t listen.

    I’m not saying I’m offended, I’m saying that you’re never going to change a single mind by prefacing your point with slurs and insults. You’re arguing like a child and making enemies before they even have a chance to hear what you’re saying.

    Personally, I don’t care. You’ve already lost any chance you’ve had of changing my mind. This argument ended before it started because any point you’re going to try to make is laced with the insinuation that I’m a stupid asshole.

    If your goal isn’t to change people’s minds, more power to you I guess. But you don’t exactly command respect by slinging curses like a 14 year old who just discovered the word “pussy” on the internet.

    Now, if you don’t want to take my constructive criticism for what it is, that’s your problem. Please do insult me 10 more times, and then find out by my lack of response how much I care.


  • I love how you’re here expecting to be taken seriously, but you actually can’t present an argument without lacing it with profanities and insults.

    Of course someone so rage-filled is playing the whataboutism card so hard and repetitively. Why does anyone care what you think? You can’t even string together two sentences without devolving into spitting bile at people who simply disagree with you.

    There are plenty of reasons to be anti-china. Pointing those reasons out doesn’t imply a stance toward America either way. Any assumption is projection on your part.