Artificial wombs are something that’s often presented as dystopian, but I would imagine would actually be a very good thing. Beyond the obvious help it would be to infertile couples that desired children, they would if commonly adopted eliminate the danger of birth and pregnancy complications, and discomfort associated with the process. Probably not everyone would want to use it, but I’d bet even having the option would mean a lot to a lot of people.

Virtually all food is gross if you think too hard about it.

If it was a joke, I definitely missed it then, I didn’t even have the slightest suspicion that it might be one.

Tbh my experience with chinese goods has been that the “garbage quality stuff that breaks easily” is usually the very cheap stuff made to compete on price and nothing else. In which case, an equivalent thing from anywhere would be the same way. Anything I’ve bought from a Chinese manufacturer at a typical price for it’s product type and from a company with a proper brand that isn’t a random string of letters has been decent enough quality. Granted that’s been electronics and not guns, but still, it’s not like the knowledge of how to make stuff doesn’t exist there somehow.

If that were true, what happens if two different non violent movements each with more than 3.5% of the population involved, exist at the same time in direct opposition to eachother?

The eggs have gone back to 5 bucks a dozen where I’m at, at least in the store I was last in. Still haven’t bothered getting any recently, but they’re not at like, 8 or 9 like they were at the same store a month or two ago. Not sure if that’s a change in the bird flu situation or if they’ve just been pushed down with some kind of subsidy or something.

Literally any time I see United Airlines branding, I immediately get “United breaks guitars” stuck in my head.

They dont work, because not lie detectors at all. To my understanding they’re basically just a tech-assisted version of trying to tell if someone is lying by trying to watch their emotional reaction. They might be able to tell you if someone is stressed, under the notion that someone lying will be more stressed than when telling the truth from the effort and worry of being caught, but that isn’t really true necessarily.

Anxiety and, due to a manufacturing bug or something, a second anxiety instead of something else.

I renamed my cat because of this guy. I don’t really like to change animals names from what it was at the shelter in case they’re used to it, and I have a cat named Mel, who I suspect was named for him because there was another nearby cat in the shelter he came from named “Gibson”.

So I’ve renamed him after Mel Brooks.

I dont think that you can design a constitution capable of this, because at the end of the day, a constitution is just words on paper, so if you can get enough people capable of violence to follow you, you can simply directly violate the thing and declare yourself dictator, and an elected executive must by being elected have a significant group that at least somewhat approves of them, and by being an executive have some ability to ensure the law is carried out implying the capacity for violence. You can try to weaken the executive to make this more difficult I suppose, but you probably cant make it impossible without breaking the functioning of the executive completely, and you also need to avoid a case where one of the other two branches seizes control from the rest as well.

Ultimately what you need for a healthy democracy is two things: an election system that actually represents the wishes and interests of the people, which is anywhere from very difficult to not technically truly possible, and a populace that cares enough about their system to not use their electoral power to elect someone (or pass laws in the case of a direct democracy) that demolish or usurp that system. The US fails at both of those at the moment, the latter possibly in part due to a long time deficiency in the former.

The first one would be meaningless without an actual change to the election system. There are more than five parties in the US after all, technically speaking, the ones outside the other two simply arent viable because first past the post voting trends towards two dominant parties.

I’ve answered responses along those lines a couple times at this point. My position is that pain is a bit like mind control; you probably could get me to change my mind that way, but the reason for doing so wouldn’t be anything to do with the reasons why I think this stuff unethical and everything to do with the way sufficient pain overrides one’s normal thinking and forces you to pay attention to it.

“Someone/something could torture you into changing your mind” doesn’t say anything about how right or wrong the original position is, you could probably torture someone into believing the earth is flat if you kept at it long enough and the victim wasn’t unusually strong willed, but that doesn’t make it so.

I would consider brain death to be death, if thats what you mean, I had thought that was a common enough position that I didnt need to state it. I guess I should clarify that I meant mental function there rather that just one’s bodily functions. If you irreparably lose all brain functions, your mind is gone, so “you” are dead even if some of your body’s cells can be kept alive.

I think I alluded to this in one of my other responses, but I would hold that things like that are situations that the person involves thinks are worse than death, especially given that all they would be able to think about under those conditions is what they are or anticipate feeling rather than what death is. They may also simply have beliefs about death that are nicer than what I view it to be.

A lot of the objection i get along those lines seems to be “But have you considered just how bad (horrible fate) is”, when I totally acknowledge that there are some truly agonizing things that can happen to someone, my objection is simply that I believe death is just that bad.

I did consider things like that to be under the case of terminal illness yes. I do understand that circumstances, especially around such disease, can bring about extreme suffering, and that the way brains process pain can override a person’s normal feelings on the matter and make them seek death to end it. Its just that, I think that an end of existence (which, not being someone that believes in afterlives, is what I believe death is) is the worst possible state, worse than any amount of suffering (even an infinite amount of such, not that a human can actually process an infinite negative stimuli). As such, I view it is as more ethical to extend life for as long as possible than allow it to end early.

I acknowledge that a person in great pain will likely disagree, even myself if my life brings me to that, but I dont take this as actual evidence that the pain is worse, because pain shuts down a person’s regular thinking and can in high enough amounts override that persons values and ability to think clearly about them. In other words, I think that a person, any person, even myself, that is in sufficient pain will consider that pain worse than death, because pain is almost like a sort of mind control in that it forces you to think that way, but I think that person, even myself in that hypothetical, would be wrong about that. In the same way that if some cruel inventor devised a machine that manipulated a person’s mind and forced them to have suicidal thoughts, I would think it wrong to let the victim act on them.

I actually agree that it is a restriction on personal freedom. Its just that, in my view, maximal personal freedom isnt actually a moral absolute, but a moral heuristic, something that is usually true and so makes a decent guideline, but not under every circumstance. This is simply one of the situations where I think that heuristic fails and no longer aligns with what I view as moral.

Probably yes, however, I consider a person under such conditions to not truly be sound of mind, as torture is rather extreme duress, so that isnt really much of an argument in my view. I dont dispute that you could inflict an amount of suffering on me that would make me wish to die, I just think, while not in that state, that if I were in it would not be ethical for me to make that choice, and so that under that circumstance I shouldnt be able to.

Everyone dies eventually, so the distinction in my mind isn’t so much the how, though obviously does change, but the when.

If you take the stance that deciding to die is okay if you know you won’t live past a certain time period, then you either need to arbitrarily definite a cut off time period for how long until death is certain a person can do this, or simply decide that anyone can do that whenever, because death is already certain given a sufficient time interval.

If you don’t, then information that someone’s death is imminent doesn’t really change that.