houseoftolstoy @[email protected]

Part 1

A man is traveling by foot when he sees a party of merchants walking in the opposite direction. With that party is a donkey who is heavily burdened with all the merchandise. The man noticing the donkey ready to collapse, states, "That donkey is carrying too much! Take off some of those things so that he does not die from exhaustion!"

The merchants take a look at the donkey and see that the man is correct. They start to discuss among themselves what they should do.

I have a theory about the supposed increase in autists. The internet is to blame. Not simply because people can look up terms and mis-diagnose themselves (though this is part of it), but rather that the internet has the unfortunate side effect of allowing people to be "terminally online."

When you are doing the vast majority of your communication through text alone, you are missing most of the actual communication you would get in a natural social situation (vocal inflections, emotions)

/1

For anyone who wants marriage and family in their future, I have some advice:

Don't marry wrong. If that means not marrying at all, so be it.

It is indeed better to not marry at all than to make the wrong choice on who to marry. I will never tell any man that they have an obligation to get married, because in spite of the fact that I am married myself, I understand that my path is not one that can or should be prescribed to all other men.

Another thing, we should most certainly not have any alternative languages for voting in the US to English. You can't read English well enough to understand the ballot? Too bad. I would not expect to go live in Japan and expect them to provide me a ballot in English for their elections (assuming I somehow became eligible in their country).

So we have both an intelligence test and assimilation test right there, with not only no extra work, but less.

Voting should remain a difficult thing to do or should become a more difficult task. If you are incapable of doing the long term planning of figuring out how to register to vote, figure out what identification you need, where and when to vote, how should I expect you to understand the consequences of who and what you vote for?

@Tfmonkey "There's nothing in the Bible that condemns incest."

Are you for real? Leviticus 18 goes over this extensively. It does not prohibit sexual relations/marriage between cousins, so that might be a point of contention. But to say there is no condemnation of incest is just wrong.

I will not defend the whole situation with Lot and his daughters. It does not condemn or condone what happened, but rather just says that it happened.

The slippery slope "fallacy" has been proven to be an effective tactic to shut down opposition to incremental enactment of unwanted policies and outcomes. In fact, I would argue that those proclaiming this as fallacious thinking are themselves are appealing to fallacious reasoning by simply declaring other outcomes as absurd. It also employs shaming tactics, where you use ridicule to suppress anyone who might see that the end outcomes are not so impossible as was implied by naysayers.

Hell, we still have people doubting whether or not we landed on the Moon. Because that (alleged) feat is indeed something that is no easy task. I myself am apathetically agnostic on whether or not we landed on the Moon. I can accept either outcome as possibly being true. But I understand that limitations are far greater than people think when it comes to other possible journeys.

Whether or not we get people to land on Mars in the future is something that would be quite the achievement. But we should keep in mind that such an achievement is not likely going to be the stepping stone to leaving our solar system to explore other stars. It is already difficult to even fathom getting people to land on Mars.

I don't hate Sci-Fi stories for having that magical technology or going beyond what is reasonably possible in other areas of reality and science. But we should treat such media with the same amount of legitimacy as fantasy stories with magical powers. It just is not going to happen.

Perhaps too many people see technological progress to that point as inevitable when they have not thought things through. It is not a coincidence that every SciFi story has some miracle "technology" that is basically just magic to allow for faster than light travel. Not only that, but it often somehow skirts over relativity, unless the story explicitly uses the difference in passages of time as a major factor in the story.

I can never have a proper conversation with too many people on the impossibility of space travel outside of our solar system. I will too often hear, "We may be surprised how far technology can go!" when I bring up how not only is faster than light travel highly unfeasible, but even getting somewhere close to it.

And keep in mind that even if we can get some object to travel near light speed, we have to account for human limits when dealing with transporting people.

Before I get told that New York City would never need a bailout, it happened in 1975. It can easily happen again.