Ask Lemmy

Broadly speaking, I'm a Pacifist and believe any kind of military confrontation or military aid is bad public policy. The idea of collateral damage - civilian casualties taken in pursuit of military objectives - is fully immoral and should be broadly rejected. Military resources should be tasked first and foremost as disaster relief and recovery with the primary mission being the preservation of human life, rather than offensive missions to defeat or deter an opposition military.

Military reprisals (starting with the MAD policy and going down to retributive strikes in border disputes) are monstrous and should be ended. Military prisons should be closed and POWs immediately repatriated. Embargos, particularly those aimed at economically vulnerable nations like Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, and North Korea, serve no useful purpose and should be lifted immediately. And the only offensive military action should be reserved for securing evacuation routes for refugees, with the bulk of resources dedicated to extending shelter and both immediate and long term relief to the refugees we accrue through these policies.

That self-defense is not a justification for lethal force.

I think that once it’s viable it would be ok to release a virus which genetically modifies all humans to be more empathetic and to think more critically.

It would be a violation of bodily autonomy, which I generally do believe in, but I think it’s necessary for the productive and positive future of humanity on the single planet which we currently inhabit.

(Yes definitions of intelligence vary, and epigenetics and nurture play a role, but we’re talking statistics and a statistical improvement is still an improvement)

i think that institutions should be respected.

It's the number one problem in american politics right now, everything we are currently experiencing, is from people treating politics like a toy. Rather than an institution.

It's so incredibly hard to state how critically important it is for the functioning of society, that the structures running our society, are respected.

I have two.

There is no such thing as toxic masculinity or toxic femininity. There is only toxic individualism.

Sometimes, you shouldn't be yourself. The person you are might be awful. Bullying and societal pressure correcting you to a norm can be a good thing.

My perspective on what rights are and how they work sometimes has people looking at me like I'm literally the devil. But it's really not that crazy.

First off, rights aren't absolute and have to be balanced against each other. Spend an hour or two following along with mundane SCOTUS cases and you'll see all kinds of examples where two reasonable principles come in conflict with each other and it's not immediately apparent which one should take precedence. I would actually argue that, if you want to treat principles as absolutes, you only get one, because any two concievable principles can (at least theoretically) come into conflict with each other. You can't serve two masters.

Moreover, what rights actually are are a theory about maintaining order and keeping people satisfied and content. The theory goes that people were reasonably content in a "state of nature" and that if they become discontent in civilization, it must be because they're lacking something that they would have naturally had. As a general rule, it works well enough - but viewing it this way means that you're viewing rights as a means to an end, rather than an end of itself, which is a very important distinction. What that means is that if you're in a situation where you have to choose between upholding rights and the end goal that rights are meant to achieve, then it makes sense to prioritize that end.

Again, something that makes people look at me like a demon (or call me a "tankie"), but like, there was a point in the Civil War where Abraham Lincoln suspended habeus corpus in response to the genuine, existential threat posed by the Confederacy, and it was probably necessary for him to do so, or at the very least he had good reason to think it was.

The well of discourse on this subject has been poisoned by politicians leveraging imaginary threats for self-interested purposes, and the fact that we in the first world are so used to basic security that we take it for granted. Certainly, there's plenty of people who say, "The ends justify the means," but who aren't really following that principle, they just want to do illegal things for other reasons, like torture being motivated by cruelty, hatred, or revenge but justified on the pretense of extracting information to save lives.

However, just because people use imaginary/exaggerated threats like that, that's no reason to think real existential threats don't exist for anyone ever. And when you're facing a legitimate existential threat, all bets are off, you should give it 100% and do whatever it takes to survive and win. If you're not prepared to do that, you should give up the fight and walk away. Otherwise, how can you ask others to lay down their lives while you're pulling your punches, just to feel good about yourself? A guilty conscience is a small price to pay.

Somehow, we've got all these people with martyr complexes who have got everything mixed up, that your job as a moral agent is about serving these abstract moral principles as an end to itself, rather than your job being to do the things that lead to the best outcomes and the principles being guidelines that generally, but not always, help you find that course of action. It at least makes sense if you believe following those principles will get you into heaven, but many people still act as though that was their chief concern even without believing in such an afterlife.

People accused of crimes deserve an equal process which includes an arrest, trial by jury, and punishment defined by law if convicted. Not mob justice or outsourced punishment.

Copyright is bad and this includes AI breaking copyright laws. Unfortunately people are too emotionally driven to come to a rational position here.

A universal right to self. Get the trans / gay community, the raw milkers, the anti vaccers, the druggies and the prochoice crowd all on the same page.

The government should make no law demanding or preventing the alteration of any and all, organs protrusions or growths of organic matter attached to and constituting the body of a sentient person not under the court directed care of another.

Religions that seek to dismantle secular democracies should be persecuted, otherwise we're just ending up with a different take on "tolerating the intolerant", and end up like the USA, Hungary, Poland, Russia, et cetera.

Religious freedom should stop at wanting to dismantle secular democracy, just like we don't allow murderous cults, we should also not allow anti-democratic ones.

I think it’s our moral imperative to correct people, namely friends and family, who blatantly regurgitate false information.

Mostly I am referring to US Conservative talking points (or propaganda).

Many people don’t want to start arguments with people they know and prefer to keep the peace or avoid hot topics, but I think letting those kind of falsehoods go unchallenged and letting people only hear assenting opinions is a small part of what got the US into this situation.

To be clear I am not talking about correcting people on every little thing because that would make for an incredibly insufferable person to be around, but intentionally misleading or false information presented as truths.

I was going to say "Copyright is theft" but I see that's basically OPs take, so I'll settle for 'same'.

People don't choose to be pedophiles. We shouldn't hate them just for existing.

People choose to abuse children, and that should be strongly punished and I think the majority agrees with me on that.

But a non-offending pedophile is someone with a disability and should be treated as such.

Buy local goods, even is it cost more... most people will go for cheapest price, even if you're handing your money to warlords and human trafficking.. same argument every time "There will always be ".

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People should be jailed for violating a DNR order.

I think peta is probably right to kill all those dogs. Better to be euthanized than to live in a kennel.

Want to know something fun about US parents??

Patents don't really protect new inventions. They give people a right to sue for financial damages and there is no criminal force of law (this is a generalization and I am not a lawyer). So courts don't really go "hey, stop using invention ABC, someone else has a patent on it." They just say "hey, that other guy invented it first, give him some money."

Patents (not other forms of IP) are made to be wildly public so people can invent things on top of previous inventions.

Does it always work like that? No. But it's one facet of US federal law that I find interesting, and a little bit hopeful.