Belarus is a simple sock-puppet for russia. This is certainly an attempt to muffle the first shots of the expansion of the ukraine war into nato. Now that I think about it, Marmalade will probably start invading Greenland at the same time and try to capture europe in a pincer.

At least we can finally get on with nuclear war, I’m tired boss.

Waydroid works great on my steam deck

it sounded like your point is that believing in an afterlife is critical to discovering morality, and that is a teaching of the Bible (and Jesus?) which I disagree with.

My point was more or less the other way around; believing in an afterlife makes discovering morality critical. Morality exists independently and is valued independently of the afterlife.

If there happens to be an afterlife it would be excellent if it self sorted the groups into similar personality types, where the moral get to hang out together and be moral while the immoral spend time tearing one another to shreds.

If there isn’t an afterlife but life has been satisfactory living morally is probably the best bet for a pleasant transition into oblivion; satisfying memories and a willingness to let go of earthly attachments would go strongly towards keeping ones final moments from being an anxious wretched mess.

Even a kid will eventually get cavities if they don’t brush, and cavities hurt.

Yes, eventually. That’s the key word. The whole point is that since the consequence and the action are so far removed from one another, it’s easy for a kid to either not care or simply not believe that it’s the truth. That’s why it’s important to have an adult step in and teach them about it before it becomes an issue.

Are you saying all people are children that can’t tell right from wrong without being told?

I am saying some people are like that, I mean, have you ever even met people before? Also to the point, many people are literally children who literally don’t have enough life experience to have a grasp of right from wrong and never get there without being explicitly taught in ways they’re willing to accept and understand. Your comment here makes me think you’re arguing in bad faith.

Sure, but once again, what does this have to do with the Bible and the afterlife? … If you don’t know what is true, how can you know what is moral?

The part where this connects to the bible and the afterlife is that Jesus attempted to give a compassionate moral framework to people who weren’t being taught that by any one at all. He’s the Louis Pasteur of the soul and you’re speaking as if the knowledge of bacteria was always self evident to anyone who cared to think about it for a minute.

If morality was objective and deterministic the Trolley problem would not exist. Many people simultaneously know what is true and choose to act in an immoral way for their own satisfaction. They often end up wildly successful in doing so as well, just open the news! Morality is completely subjective. For many people being a good person is hard when it feels like it’s going against their own self interest and part of being empathetic is understanding this dichotomy. The connection with the bible and the afterlife is a logical attempt to tie self interest back into moral behavior by stating that the reward for it kicks in after death, as it’s painfully obvious that moral behavior does not universally feed back into self interest for those of us who are still alive.

Tooth decay is the only reason to brush your teeth.

Imagine a kid who doesn’t want to brush. If they don’t brush their teeth those teeth are still there in the morning, so why would they ‘believe’ in tooth decay?

If my teeth never decayed, why would I brush them?

That’s the kid, a 12 year old who’s teeth are fine, even when he doesn’t brush. He can test that by skipping brushing every day. The consequences won’t catch up until their early twenties.

The only immediate reason to get into the habit of tooth brushing is because they’re told to do so, and if the lesson sticks then they don’t have to experience the consequence of tooth decay as they grow older. The decay isn’t a punishment dealt out as judgement for not following an arbitrary rule.

shouldn’t just start being a greedy asshole regardless.

Based on what? Greedy assholes have a great time! You certainly can’t simply assume that everyone has a moral core that aligns with your own and have that match reality.

Naturally good-hearted people don’t need compassion explained to them, if only everyone was like that, right? The suggestion ‘learn to get along with people while you’re alive or you never will’ is certainly true whether there’s an afterlife or not, but if there is then it’s even more compassionate to try to give greedy assholes a framework and a reason to try something else.

I think you have it backwards; the concept is that everyone gets an afterlife, and your attitude decides what that afterlife is going to be. “You shouldn’t need the threat of tooth decay to brush your teeth!” is also true in the same kind of way, but brushing isn’t a test you pass to get the completely unrelated gift of good teeth, it’s the process of maintaining good teeth to get to a goal of still having them later.

It’s not ‘Grrr be good or I will punish you’ like Santa Claus, it’s ‘heaven is that way and here’s the map, follow it if you want to get there, or don’t’

Jesus was an excellent dude with an excellent idea; if you’re going to be aware forever then the time you spend here on earth is going to be a microscopic fraction of the time that the you that is you exists. Deciding that you’re above others because of money or race becomes a permanent soul injury after passing on and discovering that souls come in one single value, color and race.

For example; camel in the eye of the needle parable guy would have difficulty in passing on to the next world not because he was rich, but because being rich defined who he was as a person. The parable attempted to explain that the person who needed to be above others as a core component of their identity would be endlessly miserable when put in a situation where they could never be placed above others again.

I understand that you believe what you’re saying but I don’t think you’re factually correct. You’re parroting the propaganda of a censorship and tracking regime that has no sincere desire to help children in any way.

The good news is that this is already teaching a whole new generation of UK citizens the value of VPNs and encrypted paths out of the ever-tightening information noose the UK has been trying to create for the last 41 years.

Wow that’s a lot of pointless words. They were told to implement an internet user tracking system or be fined, but since they have no desire or obligation to do so they chose to cease operating under those rules. This has nothing to do with children and everything to do with tracking adults, there’s your ‘simply’. Trying to spin this as ‘protect the children’ is completely worthless word garbage.

You’re not in UK. UK banned imgur because the crown is trying to build a database of internet users to oppress and imgur said no.

If you’re going to talk about the Slate just mention it by name https://www.slate.auto/en

It’s a bet, the current owners have wagered that the structure will exist long enough for someone else purchase it later at a higher price, under the auspice that they in turn will be able to pass this bag forward again later. Everyone actually involved knows there’s no value to it OTHER then the record of previous sale prices and the line that keeps going up.

if there’s a consistent track record of being able to sell an nft for more than one paid for it, people are more likely to buy it just so they can sell it later for more than it was purchased for. It’s not that much different than any other kind of authenticated memorabilia; you’re not paying for the memorabilia, you’re paying to track the authentication in a repeatable consistent way.

You know the banana with tape over it art piece, right? There is nothing special about the tape or the banana at all, the special part is the authenticated set of instructions that allow the ‘owner’ of the certificate to present the work according to specifications, and since the maintainer of the records proving authenticity will only recognize one person at a time that set of instructions becomes non-fungible.

And yet it not very long ago it was feasible for a single income earner on minimum wage to not only be able to afford a home, but do so while supporting a family.

Could they be anything other than a white male? Was that by any chance directly after a major war that significantly reduced the male population? Were the houses often extremely low quality and built without any modern safety codes? Historical context matters, if you weren’t in the privileged group this scenario was just as much of a fantasy then as it is today.

You could manage it with some kind of benevolent Home Owners Association! That always works fantastically!

The end? Is he dead now? Was this some kind of death-bed confession or something? Did he at least donate his time to the cause that he got paid so much to tear down?

Oh, no, he’s just getting paid by someone new now. He doesn’t need credit, he cashed in just fine on MAGA and now he’d also like a check from the gays. The correct message is ‘Working for the nazis leaves a stain on your reputation that a compensated non-apology will not wash away’

Are you by any chance a battered spouse, eager to accept any insincerity?

I think this will come down to us defining ‘intelligence’ in fundamentally different ways, so arguing over that term won’t get us anywhere. Smart isn’t a monolith, in that someone who is ‘intelligent’ will automatically make intelligent choices in all aspects of their life, instead intelligence tends to be siloed into particular areas. Sometimes intelligence just lets one rationalize themselves into incredibly self destructive positions. Those are the one I would consider ‘dumb’ in this scenario, not through lack of raw intelligence but in the embrace of stupid behaviors such as, as we say, staying inside the burning house while rationalizing that the fire might go out before it gets to them and burns them up.

Critically those self deluding people will argue themselves into behaviors that closely mimic those who simply cannot comprehend the situation at all, and as such their kindness and intelligence becomes a distinction without a difference.

I think in the long term AI is going to save the planet via mechanisms exactly like this; reducing the population level to something the planet can support not by culling existing humans but by preventing new humans from being born in the first place! This is the most gentle of all apocalypse, the one where humanity just packs it in and stops messing with the planet.

also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXTSrC1_7QQ

I think if you set a house on fire the people who run out could be considered smart while the people who stay inside hoping the fire doesn’t notice them could be considered dumb.

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