There is virtue in minding your own business. If it doesn't effect you directly you don't need an opinion on it and you certainly shouldn't share it or expect anyone who is effected to care what you think. You're a bad person if you support people who want to use force to control how other people live their lives. You're evil if you would use force to control how someone else lives their life.

Freedom of religion is important and religions shouldnt receive special treatment

The free movement of people is a human right!

Note that capital is free to go whatever it wants to.

Victims should be the ones to decide whether forgiveness is deserved. no one else.

All drugs should be legal, but bodily autonomy is to high a purity test for everyone on planet earth.

Admit it everyone, capitalists will not let us live in peace. At least let me get high to numb the pain of existence.

People shouldn't be jumping through hoops to conceive their own child while there are already children in need of a home

You can't direguard anyone's humanity. Even billionaires. There are no universally bad people, negativity is always relational.

Though I do think you can weigh a billionaire's comfort against the folks they made billions from, and that may just be potent enough for the death penalty.

However, I don't think punishment is a humane solution. Rehabilitation and integration are always preferred. Though again, some folks integrate best as corpses.

The purpose of an education is to learn how to think, not how to work.

A lot of universities are being treated as training centers for the world of work - and this is not ok.

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

We need stricter social rules again in a lot of areas and children need to be brought up stricter again. Now I don't mean we should get back to being in other people's business in regards to what they wear or who they love. But let's go back to shunning people for littering. Teach kids to sit still and be quiet in certain spaces like public transport or restaurants. Ostracize people who are loud and disruptive in public. Let's just implement some stricter social rules again.

I'll just keep being a nuisance here and say it. I genuinely do like this instance but I can't make sense of the infatuation for the AI here when isn't this part of the problem? AI "art" generators are fundamentally wrong and harmful to the artistic community. Artists are part of the nerd crowd too. We studied like crazy to hone our craft. There are a few traumatic historic events that the use of AI art theft machines harken back to. In more recent history, fascist regimes have tried to erase art altogether, or covet it for themselves. The same can be said for colonists, and it was to our chagrin a casually accepted part of Western culture to incorporate all sorts of bastardized appropriations of beautiful things they'd seen that didn't belong to them. It's just something to think about.

At the end of the day, people are thoughtlessly using a machine that takes the hard work of countless artists (of all different walks of life, different classes, backgrounds, mediums) to spit out uncanny, empty slop.

I'll keep saying it. And it may take years to undo this shit if ever. That's fine.

Okay, a pretty decent amount of people feel similarly as I do on this topic, but here I just feel like an outlier at times due to the number of pro-AI slop communities. Then again, I also notice that only a handful of the same people run those communities and contribute to them. I guess it's because we're a smaller community and I'm also a negative Nancy, so I tend to notice those glaring issues more here. I think it's important to get this message across on here, because why do we want to emulate even one ounce of Musk's energy here? Fuck that. Reddit already has their Midjourney sh-stuff. And they are not like us. So, we should strive to be better than Reddit.

Genocide is bad.

It's promoted by hegemony throughout my culture. Both "parties" support genocide almost completely. If I even ask for a non-genocidal candidate, I'm attacked by libs. It's a disgusting society.

To quote Margaret Thatcher, "a man who doesn't own a car by the age of 26 can count himself a failure."

I heavily disagree with that statement. Everyone has reasons not to drive. From disability, to cities being designed for walking and public transport, to being opposed to the pollution that is caused as a result of it, to not wanting to participate in traffic congestion, to not being able to fucking afford one, to being so bad at driving that you just give up after failing that license test multiple times, or to simple personal preference. Are all these people failures apparently? How does that make sense? Well, I guess the people who give up after failing the license test are, but everyone else??

Religious people who push their fake shit on you.

Can you just NOT!

If I wanted an imaginary friend WTF makes you think I'd pick your asshole POS of a god?

That was rhetorical.

Your feelings are not facts.

Being offended, doesn't mean you're in the right and the other person is in the wrong.

Just because your religion says something (or claims it does), doesn't put you in the right.

From my point of view of life, it feels like the belief of "Do unto others as you would like others to do to you" is no longer something most people seem to believe in.

The death penalty should be used only for white collar crimes and violations of the public trust. These crimes have the greatest impact on society, and usually have the strongest evidence reducing the chances of a wrongful conviction.

If you're a juror and you vote guilty, knowing that the person you're voting guilty for will be executed, if they are later found not guilty, your head should be next on the chopping block.

I am fundamentally against the death penalty. It is not a power the government should ever have.

Pacifism.

The overwhelming majority of people, no matter where they sit in terms of culture, religion, and politics, see total nonviolence as a naive position.

But it’s among my most deeply held beliefs.

One for the world:

I think dog / cat ownership is immoral. There are huge energy and material costs to supporting those animals.

Cats when allowed outside will decimate ecosystems and are literal invasive species. As for dogs, I can't help but feel that they've have been weaponized into a deniable tool for harassing other people.

One for Lemmy:

I think capitalism can be good. I think in an ideal world where everyone's needs are met, there will still be a market and people getting ludicrously wealthy. And I think in that ideal world those ludicrously wealthy people can translate that wealth into political power.

This seems insane for those of us trapped in this present, but I think it is good for there to be a mechanism where understanding some reality that is tied to physical phenomena gives people power.

I think large organizations can get by for a very long time inculcating in their members strange philosophies. If the only path to power is by acquiescing to your superiors and parroting dogma, I think that would be bad.

Of course, conditions in the real world look nothing like those in that ideal world.

Edited away: I think dog / cat ownership makes you a bad person.

I thought it was unnecessarily inflammatory and regret choosing that inflammatory language

I think one of the more controversial ones I have is that I don't tend to be in favor of things like MAID or voluntary euthanasia. I understand why people are for it, but I don't like the idea of killing someone over something that is ultimately in their head, like pain or a person's desires, and the way I tend to evaluate the value of life has something of a floor (that is to say, I do not really believe that there is such a thing as a "fate worse than death" so to speak, because I believe that death is the least functional state a person can have and anything above that implies at least some functioning even if that state is still highly undesirable).

• Anyone who says 'science doesn't care about your feelings' likely has a very limited understand of science
• There should be no prison but no penal system altogether
• Vote, don't vote, do whatever the hell you want but don't shove it into people's face
• Aiming to be politically 100% pure and judging those who can't be as pure boils down to chasing political activism cookies/elo. The only useful thing is doing one's best.

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.

Can you explain what IP is? Abbreviations don't mean anything if you don't know it.

I think individualism has gone too far. We pander too much to each person’s individual rights, and not each person’s individual responsibilities. I’m not talking about human rights here, I’m not talking about labour rights or any of the genuinely important stuff.

I’m talking about the self important experiences of the individual. The idea that someone has the right to believe whatever they want without responsibility to those around them. The most obvious answer is anti-vaxxers that spread literal lies. Whatever about vaccine hesitancy when there is legitimate peer reviewed medical potential for harm, there are levels of hesitancy. But when it goes to the point of fabricating data and spreading lies that will ultimately only cause harm to society, then in that case I’m ok with those people having any free speech rights voided, including full legal culpability for the harm it causes, akin to medical terrorism.

Where established data shows that people are contributing harm to society, contradicting scientifically proven data, and a person deliberately continues to spread misinformation when they are informed that they are causing harm, then they clearly do not care for the protection of the community, they should have forego societal protections for themselves, rights to free speech, rights to own property, and where necessary incarceration. If you’re in a position of power/authority or have specific training in the field, then you should face exponentially greater legal consequences for this deliberate harm.

Many people may agree with the general principles of this sentiment but as a society we are not ready to have that conversation, because the first person to be locked up would trigger a mass protest not widespread agreement. All because we have permitted individualism to far overpower the importance of collectivism. Rights should not be absolute they should always be coupled to responsibilities. Even if that responsibility is simply not to cause deliberate harm to others.

And the idea that someone’s beliefs about reality are somehow important to uphold. That the person above believes they are not doing harm, despite being told otherwise, that this idea should hold any weight in court is wrong. People should be informed of their ignorance and measurable reality is the only true reality that should be taken into account . Just like ignorance of the law is not a defence, ignorance of reality should not be a defence.

If a person is spreading misinformation that causes harm, they should be served a legal notice that outlines that they have been “judged to have been causing harm to society by spreading information that is adjudicated as false and harmful by an sanctioned and independently operated committee, whose ruling has been further agreed upon by a plurality of specialist training bodies in the relevant field. The only entities who contradict this societally important and data derived ruling are those that mean harm to society or those without the relevant knowledge base to make any informed statements on the matter. As of this point you will be treated as the former now that you have been served notice that the information you are spreading is factually incorrect and harmful. If you continue to spread this misinformation you sacrifice a portion or all of your rights afforded to you by this society. Your assets can be seized, you may be incarcerated, and your access to any and all communication with other humans may be partially or entirely withheld. This is a measure to combat information terrorism.”

Civil liberties are a privilege not an inalienable right.

You might think this sounds dystopian but it’s my answer to your question. Obviously it needs baked in failsafes to stop a small few individuals from corrupting it for authoritatian abuse. But just because something could be hypothetically abused doesn’t make it a bad idea. You just need to insulate against the abuse.

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.

Summary death to bicycle thieves, and anyone else actively wrecking the world. I am averse to the death penalty in most cases, but bicycle thieves are actively wrecking their communities. Someone rides a bike because they:

• Have no other option
• Are trying to improve their health
• Are living car-free or car-lite
• Are trying to enjoy the locals with active transportation OR
• Are complying with a court-ordered driving suspension

Stealing bicycles undermines these goals and poisons the community.

Of course, we could easily scale this up to, say, almost all CEOs of megacorporations.

drinking and driving isn't inherently more dangerous than just driving, and it's a skill you can practice.