They’re both quite pleasant, actually.
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the vast majority of people aren’t stupid as in cognitively impaired, but completely intellectually incurious to the point where they appear to be stupid and simple to those that are more intellectually curious and therefore spend more time reading about and exploring.
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the modern american bachelor’s degree has become all-but completely devauled.
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college should be publically funded like secondary school.
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Active Nonvoting is a perfectly valid and acceptable response to democracy. It might be the best response.
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The imbalance/distribution of wealth and the resulting sociocultural stratification is the cause of our societal ills. Period.
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Black people are louder and more ill-behaved in public than any other races, regardless of socioeconomic class and context. Anyone who disagrees with this is simply trying to be politically correct and is wilfully ignoring the prevailing truth of the statement.
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In 100 years, humanity will look back on the lack of universal healthcare with the level of disbelief with which we look back on child labor and debtor’s prisons.
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Homosexuality is most likely the direct result of childhood trauma such as molestation.
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The vast majority of people should not have children, and the vast majority of people that do have children don’t give the decision the necessary amount of thought and consideration beforehand, instead just assuming that procreation is and should be the default. This results in most people being bad parents.
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Anyone who argues for abortion by invoking the “women’s rights over their bodies” argument is irrational and is refusing to approach the debate in a fair way. The only way to honestly debate abortion is for both sides to acknowledge that it’s about killing another human being, and the debate should be about whether or not this killing is justified.
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The death penalty is barbaric and shameful.
VCO3 is a cunt.
deleted
No point in argueing
The United States has clearly entered a period of cultural and political decline that it will likely not recover from. The war in Iraq will be viewed by historians as the beginning of the end for US place as a superpower.
People who watch American Idol need to be sterilized for the betterment of the country.
I could defend these outside the Pit, but most would take fifty pages at minimum to do with any rigor – this being why I don’t venture into many philosophical/ethical debates around here – and since this thread is essentially just streams of consciousness, why not.
Pragmatism:
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Barring sociopathic malevolence, pragmatism is the essence of evil. People trying to accomplish goals without regard for the processes by which they do so are the cause of pretty much everything that’s fucked up in the world today.
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Ends do not justify means and any argument that purports that they do is equal to any other argument suggesting the same, regardless of scale.
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Actually, on that note, abstractions taken in regard to given situations do not change with respect to scale alone. If we’re arguing pure morality, stealing ten billion dollars is equivalent to stealing a penny.
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Morality is subjective; that doesn’t mean it’s indefinite. Subjectivity means that it varies on the individual level, which in turn means that, to a given individual, a set of moral beliefs is what it is. If your morality relevant to a given abstraction changes depending upon the situation – in terms of scale or any other purely practical element – then your beliefs are inconsistent and you’re either a hypocrite or a pragmatist; either way, fuck off.
Debate:
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Morality and personal values are not the same thing. Morality is, or should be at any rate, a system of logically-derived beliefs based upon a very few core assumptions that may qualify as personal values. Additional personal values are nothing more than limits individuals choose to set for themselves, and are independent of morality or other abstract restrictions. When arguing morality, don’t insert your personal values into it; when I grant you your personal values, don’t pretend I made any concessions to the validity of your morality. As an example, if you choose not to wear green shirts, that’s a personal value, not a moral stance, so when I agree that you have the right to do that, I’m not saying you’re logically justified in holding that belief.
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Giving examples of abstractions when debating is worthless, because all the person will do is fucking nitpick them in ways that have nothing whatsoever to do with what you were originally talking about, thus derailing the discussion and making sure they don’t actually have to argue their fucking point on an ideological level. I’m sure someone read my example above and constructed some stupid-ass reason why someone’s morality might prohibit the wearing of green shirts (“But what if the person believed that wearing green had a correlation with murdering people?”) rather than understanding the fucking point I was trying to illustrate and allowing the discussion to continue. The same applies to analogies and metaphors. Understand abstractions and debate the logic and/or the backing assumptions, or fuck off.
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Yeah, I’m long-winded when explaining points; this is both because I want to make sure you understand the nuances of what I’m saying and because I want to head off any potential nitpicky sidetracks. If you can’t be bothered to comprehend statements longer than one sentence, fuck off. Further, if your argument can be summed up to your satisfaction in one sentence, there’s a high probability that it’s stupid.
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When it comes to debate, fuck the fucking law. The fucking law is some shit some person wrote down on a piece of paper and got a hundred other people to sign off on, quite possibly without having read it. At best, it’s a single position; if you agree with it, then fine, give me the logical justification for the law and the assumptions/principles used for the logic. At that point it’s something I’ll consider discussing. Coming into a discussion of morality or abstractions and stating that something is the law contributes nothing. Yes, you read a piece of paper, here’s a cookie, fuck off.
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Similar to the above, “rules are rules” fails to be an argument. That something is a rule does not mean it isn’t stupid; it means somebody wrote it down on a piece of paper. Yes, in many cases, you have a choice to avoid the situation to which the rule applies; that also does not mean the rule is not stupid. If I argue that a rule is stupid, I’m not arguing that the person making the rule doesn’t have the right to make it; I’m arguing that the rule is stupid. If you can’t understand the difference, fuck off.
Miscellaneous:
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You have the right to be an asshole. If you choose to exercise this right, I and others have an equal right to think you’re an asshole and tell you so. Stop fucking defending asshole behavior by insisting that there are no legal (grrr!) or moral restrictions on your doing so.
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“Fuck” is a perfectly legitimate word that concisely conveys a multitude of widely varying specific meanings. Its use, in and of itself, says nothing whatsoever about the extent of the user’s vocabulary. The same holds true for any number of “swear words”.
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“Swear word” is a stupid-ass concept to have. Words are collections of syllables intended to convey concepts with a minimum level of abstraction to improve clarity. The only reason to be offended by a word is if the concept conveyed is offensive. If I call you a dumbfuck, I’m insulting your intelligence; be offended. If I stub my toe in your vicinity and I say “fuck”, I spoke a syllable that was not directed at you and was clearly intended to convey nothing beyond my momentary annoyance and pain. There is no reason whatsoever for you to be offended by that. If you ask me, we ought to integrate “swear words” into the vocabularies of kindergarteners, so that by the time they get to be adults, nobody cares anymore.
Okay, I think I’m done. DAMN, that was cathartic. Thanks.
There should be a Stupidity Gestapo. Stupid people- defined as people dangerously lacking in common sense, or demonstrating a serious inability to function in the real world- would simply be hustled into cars with tinted windows by people in dark suits and sunglasses and taken away for re-education.
Penal Colonies and Gulags are a good idea, and should be seriously considered as an alternative to the Death Penalty.
Democracy doesn’t work. Your vote is worth nothing, and politicians don’t care what you think about any given issue.
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Women who are raped should just lie back and enjoy it. They were just asking for it anyway.
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Statement #51 is assinine. A smarter statement follows.
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Disregard statement #52. It’s stupid.
::nods::
I’ll add that our best chance of getting out of this century is that a large enough disaster (war, meteor strike, etc) whacks the survivors upside the head enough to make the realise them way we’re going. But it’s going to have to take out a lot of (innocent, or fairly blameless) people in the process and even then we’d probably just screw it up again.
I’m an illiterate idiot.
No really.
I read this thread title as “What do you believe you could only say in the Pit?”
Notice an important word missing?
Please disregard my previous post.
(i.e. I just said something controversial that would result in a flameout for the sake of saying something controversial)
If it’s any consolation, bigbabysweets2000, I read it the same way you did, and was confused by the responses.
I believe that the world is better now than it ever has been, and will only continue to get better. I also believe that if you start a thread saying that, you’ll get, like, three responses, and the thread will die a quick and ignominious death.
35.5 People under 60 should have their tax rate increased as necessary to fund the additional testing.
35.6 People under 60 who receive three or more traffic tickets in total should lose their license to drive on their 60th birthday.
Anyone who says everyone should have access to a network of roads and highways, yet hasn’t spent a weekend filling in potholes, is a fucking hypocrite.
On second thought, maybe Scientology is a good thing to try.
People who can’t follow a simple request from the OP and not hijack the thread need to be banned from the internet forever.
Well, yes, and the criminals are pretty bad too.
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Any fundamental declaration of the rights of Man is sad horseshit. We’re here to be born, sling shit, eat shit, and die. Anything else is gravy.
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We would all be a lot better off if no one recognized this fact.
People who believe these things make my job more fun.