…Have you tried a leash? (On a hand, not a neck. For safety.)

And what is your belief based on? What falsifiable evidence do you have that it’s actually correct, factually true?

In other words, how do you know?

Because Jesus Christ rose from the dead. OP is a Christian and believes that.

Any evidence for that, aside from a book that doesn’t cite sources? Look mate, I can believe that Harry Potter really defeated He Who Shall Not Be Named and saved the muggle world from his domination, but does that make it right? Would that be a positive thing to base all of my life on?

This is the same as a Christian telling an atheist that their gay relationship is wrong.

…And yet, they do that all the time, don’t they? Not only that, but they try to pass laws preventing them from happening. Or to prevent trans people from accessing appropriate healthcare. Or to ensure that women don’t have rights to their own bodies.

No, it doesn’t matter to the universe. Morality can still matter to you. This is the idea that existentialism is built around: you have to make choices for yourself.

There’s nothing particularly wrong with lust, sexual attraction, desire for connection, etc. It’s all part of simply being human. Why would you assume that the teachings of the Christian bible are correct, not in just this matter, but any other? Why not any other scripture? Buddhists, for instance, would say that any desire prevents you from progressing spiritually. Satanists (me!) would say that no desire is inherently wrong, and that it’s how the desire is expressed, and it’s whether it overrides someone else’s autonomy that makes a thing right or wrong.

I don’t view paying a prostitute for sexual services as being inherently wrong. It’s wrong if you’ve agreed to sexual fidelity with another person (terms and conditions apply), and it’s wrong if you’re using a prostitute that has been forced into sexual labor. But if you haven’t promised a partner (or partners) that you will be sexually faithful to them, and the prostitute is in the field willingly–or, at least as willingly as anyone that works at any job–then it’s not really any more wrong than, say, paying someone to make a meal for you when you’re hungry. Labor is labor, regardless of the nature of the work.

The first step to overcoming this ‘problem’ is therapy. You want a sexual and emotional connection, and you feel like you’re unable to find it otherwise. You should find a licensed psychotherapist–not a member of the clergy, not a life coach–and work on why you have problems finding that.

Why do you believe that it does?

Look mate, we’re a cosmic blip. On the scale of the universe, we don’t even register. We’re born, we live, we die, and on the scale of how long the universe has existed, it’s not even a blink. The universe is about 13,900,000,000 years old. The first single-cell organisms emerged about 3,500,000,000 years ago. Humans, in our current form, have only existed for a mere 300,000 years. Our sun will turn into a red giant in about 5,000,000,000 years, which will sterilize the surface of the earth, but it won’t matter to humans, because we will have evolved into an entirely different species and almost certainly have gone completely extinct billions of years before that happens.

NOTHING we do matters to the universe. There is nothing we can do that will affect the course of the entire universe. Any belief to the contrary is simply terror management. So how could one moral code, in the grand scheme of the universe, matter more than any other?

What makes you believe, aside from your attempts to manage your terror of non-existence, that any of your morality matters at all?

Why do you assume that a god is necessary for morality? What led you to this conclusion? What falsifiable evidence do you have?

I know, right? How many of the people shitting on everyone right of Emma Goldman and Mikhail Bakunin ever did any real community organizing, volunteering, or political canvassing? How many have actively worked to push the Democratic party farther left, rather than just shitposting online about how awful Dems are? Sure, we all want (well, a lot of the people here, I suspect) want socialist candidates that are smart and tough on the ballot. But are we doing to work at a local level to get there? This shit doesn’t happen overnight; you start work locally, work up to a state level, and then go national, once you’ve got that base of support.

Yeah, it’s def. fed posting. Because you sure as fuck don’t do that kind of organizing online.

Here’s the thing: if you’re going to be a real revolutionary militia, you really don’t have a great way of organizing. Everything is going to have big risks. But encouraging people to commit crimes in a public forum, where every user name can be pretty easily traced back to a real person? Oh yeah, that’s absolutely fed posting, whether they know it or not.

The only way it wouldn’t be fed posting would be if this was a .onion site, and there was absolutely no verification of users. But then you’re just kicking the can down the road; sure, it’s safe to post stuff online then, but eventually you have to meet people IRL if you plan to do more than just talk, and that’s when the feds are gonna getcha.

I believe that diatomaceous earth works on all insects. It’s not poison; it’s finely ground silica, and it essentially wrecks their insect lungs. It will also wreck your lungs if you aren’t careful with it (silicosis is super-bad, m’kay?). The issue will be getting it where it needs to be to affect them, and you’ll have to re-apply after rain.

I’ve had cats named Baldr, Hermóðr, Grendel, and Wotan. I’ve currently got a Valkyrie, Brynhildr, Freyja, and Freya (we got Freya when she was a year old because her owner couldn’t keep her, and we already had Frejya, so…). But our current boy cats are Svartur ('cuz he’s black), Robert, and Charlie.

There’s absolutely no way in hell that it’s just adultery, not when she explicitly says that she can’t remain and still hold on to her ‘Christian’ values. Paxton has done a fuckton of things things that explicitly go against what Jesus taught in the four gospels, and against damn near everything that Paul wrote as well, so it’s gotta be more than just extra-marital sex.

It’s mens rea, lit. “guilty mind”, e.g. intent. If you take an action with the intent to cause a death, that’s murder (in my state, that would specifically be malice murder). If you take an action that is likely to cause a death with reckless indifference, but not intent, that’s usually something like murder in the second degree. If you cause a death through negligence or by accident, that’s usually some form of manslaughter.

Most traffic accidents are negligent; people don’t (…usually…) get into a car with the intent to kill someone, nor are they usually driving in a way that the know is likely to cause harm to other people. There are obvs. factors that will affect this–such as driving drunk–but causing a death is usually unintentional, and not through reckless indifference.

Indeed. It runs smack into the problem of falsifiability.

As far as I can tell, there is nothing in chiropractic practice that is not quackery.

Think about it this way: the basic practice is the idea that you have misalignments causing problems, and that you can manually manipulate the body back into alignment. But then what keeps you from getting unaligned again as soon as you stand up? (Nothing, of course! That’s why you have to keep going back!) Take, for example, the common inguinal hernia. You can manually manipulate it so that you’re forcing the intestines back through the abdominal wall. And it absolutely relieves the immediate discomfort. But you’re not actually fixing anything; you need surgery to stitch the tear up. If you have weak support structures causing a problem, then physical therapy is going to create a permanent solution. If you have a herniated disc that’s not healing and causing referred pain, then you need to surgically fix the herniation.

I had a ‘pastor’ try and witness to me yesterday, insisting that his spiritual experiences made him right, while the spiritual experiences of people that converted to Judaism or Islam meant they had been deceived by the devil.

I opt for bitcoin because it has more utility value for me.

My bank makes it an enormous pain in my ass to buy things from overseas vendors; they won’t process any payments that are going outside of the US border. The rationale is ‘fraud’, even when you’re dealing with well-known and trusted vendors. Even when I try calling my banks and telling them to pre-authorize the charges, they won’t go through. The only way I can get around that within the established financial system is by using a 3rd party payment service; those 3rd party services make their money by lopping off a percentage of that purchase. E.g., if I’m buying something for $1000 from China (and we’re going to ignore tariffs, duties, taxes, and shipping costs for the moment), then I may have to pay $1040 for it, because of the fees that are taken out. On the other hand, if I’m buying from a trusted vendor, and I use bitcoin, I can just send it to them. Bitcoin doesn’t care where it’s going, and–assuming you don’t care about speed of confirmations–transaction fees can be quite a bit lower than using any other payment system. (And, BTW, transaction fees are built into all payment processing systems; it’s just not apparent to individuals on the purchasing end. That means that if something costs .001btc, then I have to send, say, .0010001btc to the vendor, but then the)

Speculation doesn’t play a role in it for me.

I have no direct use for gold; I can’t plate connectors.

Yes.

But many people–and I’m not saying you do this–but many people get gold, silver, and diamonds confused, and think that their intrinsic value is linked to their perceived value. does that make sense?

…Except that gold, like the dollar, and like bitcoin, has the value it does because people believe it does. Sure, gold’s a great semiconductor. But if that was all we used it for, the price of gold would be a tine fraction of what it is. Diamonds are great as abrasives and in certain cutting applications, but that’s all synthetic now. Natural diamonds only have high value because of artificial scarcity and advertising.

You cant deal with or compromise with them

You kind of have to, since government relies on the consent of the governed. When enough of them will no longer consent to being governed, your government will fail. But if you really want to address that problem, you look at the reasons why people turn to fascism; it’s not something that happens in a vacuum.

In this case, the dems are handling it badly; they’re trying to move to the right in order to give the fascists the things that they say they want. But what they say they want isn’t really the root issue, which means that dems can never go far enough right to win their vote.