"I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure."

• Clarence Darrow

(I thought it was Mark Twain before I looked it up for the wording)

The systems allow people to do harm, we need to violently oppose them.

Jeff Bezo may suck as a person, but capitalism is designed to make people like him as the ruling class. If you don't like it, fight it.

The problem with the death penalty is largely down to potential miscarriages of justice.

What if they get the wrong person and some innocent is put to death? Do you really want the state to have that sort of power over its citizens?

It is significantly cheaper to keep someone in prison for life than the death sentence process.

I like life imprisonment for heinous people specifically because it seems like the less merciful option. Look at how many mass shooters and terrorists also take their own lives during the act - suicide is one of their objectives. If we can capture them alive and make them live in a small room, eating unexciting food and sleeping on thin mattresses for decades still to come - that's the ultimate rebuke to their ideologies of death. Execution, on the other hand, is giving them what they seek.

Plus the amount of money that gets sunk into looking after their old murdering asses.

Same, I don’t necessarily think it prevents any crimes from happening, but there are some individuals who will provide nothing back to society that could possibly make up for what they’ve done, and their continued existence is a threat to those around them that have to deal with them on a daily basis.

BUT until the criminal justice system can be reformed or provide more equatable justice, I don’t know that we can 100% say everyone on death penalty deserves it. I don’t know how we fix it, but it shouldn’t be left to private individuals or groups to have to exonerate people on death row.

Good luck getting that CEO in a court room

I believe that the death penalty is worthless.

If the crime is bad enough to kill a person anyway, why waste their productive potential? Same for locking those people up for life instead.

The mines yearn for the labour of the bourgeois.

In order to get 99.9% certainty, 1) you are saying you are willing to have one in a thousand death penalties against innocents, and 2) that requires a system made of people to do their job correctly 99.9% of the time. I dont think there is a job on earth that people in a large group can do that well.

I know this is said a lot, but it clearly needs to be said again. The "Free" in FOSS means "Freedom" not "Gratis". You can sell FOSS. You can make money off of FOSS. People do it all the time.

Very much. Especially if paying means not a subscription & it was never ad-support + inundated with malicious trackers. Too often the proprietary tools I am required to use are clearly tracking me & are by companies with horrible reputations, but this doesn’t have to always be the case.

Regardless of pain perception: Assuming someone is okay with killing a fruit fly but not a human, they have to draw the line somewhere. And a pig for example is WAY closer to human than to a fruit fly. It's a sentient being with a brain that's not really so far from human, compared to the fruit fly which is essentially a tiny biological robot.

In fact, it's kinda weird to draw the line at humans, especially when there's such a big overlap between other animals and human children in terms of cognitive capabilities.

I think it's very reasonable to draw the line after insects, where we can be reasonably certain that there's no complex thought or sentience. The value and subjective experience of an insect versus a farm animal are hardly comparable.

This is something I think about from time to time and essentially get nowhere.

I try and live-capture and release bugs from my house (the only things I actively kill in this regard is mosquitos).I also hunt/fish.

If I saw a deer trapped on a frozen lake I'd go out and rescue it, yet I'd shoot that same deer in a different place under a different context. It's not really consistent, except in intentionality I suppose.

I do place a higher value on the life of animals that are more "intelligent" (in a way that feels more human) compared to other animals. For example, I'm not upset at all when I use hand sanitizer and presumably wipe out a whole swath of life, but I'm sad if a bird hits a window and dies. Part of that is the intentionality again maybe? The bacteria "had" to die, and the bird didn't; I'd feel less bad about the bird if I saw a natural predator take it down but it's still more upsetting than even unintentionally killing an insect.

I'm not vegan, I'm just trying to eat less meat, but I see this discourse pop up from time to time in vegan communities.

A similar argument is often made regarding what would happen to vegetarians if they learned that plants can feel pain. This is often posed as a hypothetical, but I've heard that some studies suggests plants and fungi especially may be aware of when they're being eaten. Whether or not that equates to pain, I don't think a consensus has been reached.

But for the sake of argument, let's say that plants do feel pain while you eat them. If your ethos is to reduce overall suffering in the food chain, then it's still logical to abstain from meat. Livestock living a vegetarian life eat a lot of plants.

You might alternatively come to the conclusion that there is no such thing as ethical consumption. An extreme position you might take is that the best way to reduce suffering is to remove yourself from the food chain. If you starve yourself, you'll be consuming less, your greenhouse emissions become zero, and you lessen your impact on social services and infrastructure that is often strained to the breaking point.

Obviously, the solution is not to just kill yourself. But advocating for more ethical consumption seems like a noble cause.

Most Christians in Europe are like this too, tbh

The housing crisis has literally nothing to do with families owning a single home. There is far more than enough housing for everyone in the country. We need to outlaw AirBnB everywhere, and outlaw corporate ownership of residences.

I don't even care about the people who have multiple homes, they're just small fries in comparison. We can do them after the corporations all switch to that business model.

In every policy change there will be losers and winners, lowering the cost of housing has been a long time coming. So long in fact people assume it's a great way to invest and raise money.

You make plenty of sense here. It's all about intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation right?

For some reason whenever I tried to excel and take pride in my work or invent small improvements to things, I was either rewarded with nothing but higher expectations without higher compensation, or more often, I was just shut down entirely and told to shut up and get back to grinding.

None of that romanticized "I like your style, kid howabout a raise?" hollywood crap happened to me!

I think people more often than not want to do well, they want to be good at something, get better at it, take pride in their work. Being a complete layabout is exhausting!

But just like you, I got to the point of saving my passion for my own projects, and just doing what's most visible in the job description to not get fired, because I got real tired of being actively punished for making an effort.

Abortion should be legal in all cases

The thread replying to the parent comment is a good example of how restricting abortion access requires people to arbitrarily decide definitions of when a fetus "becomes human."

It's best to leave that decision up to the pregnant person in consultation with their medical providers.

but a fetus becomes a unique individual when there is clear, identifiable, brainwave activity.

If there's no brainwave activity, it's not a life, no matter how many weeks old pre-birth or how many years old after birth.

This is another arbitrary definition of personhood. That doesn't mean it's wrong. But there are other (equally arbitrary) definitions that are reasonable too. (And there are a bunch of unreasonable definitions, but we don't need to go into those.)

At what point would you consider it to be sufficiently brain so that its activity is brainwave activity?