Polygamy should be legal. If three or more consenting adults want to commit to each other, who the hell cares? Same goes for relatives in sexual relationships who aren't having kids. Like why do we care who fucks who as long as everyone is capable of enthusiastic consent?

I treat all people with religious beliefs as members of a dormant terrorist cell.

They could be your nice neighbor with whom you can interact normally on a day-to-day basis, but in the end they all have compromised against logic and, in the right conditions, that is a terrible liability.

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.

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.

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.

Paying for your porn is righteous (assuming the money goes to the actual actors).

Broadly speaking, I'm a Pacifist and believe any kind of military confrontation or military aid is bad public policy. The idea of collateral damage - civilian casualties taken in pursuit of military objectives - is fully immoral and should be broadly rejected. Military resources should be tasked first and foremost as disaster relief and recovery with the primary mission being the preservation of human life, rather than offensive missions to defeat or deter an opposition military.

Military reprisals (starting with the MAD policy and going down to retributive strikes in border disputes) are monstrous and should be ended. Military prisons should be closed and POWs immediately repatriated. Embargos, particularly those aimed at economically vulnerable nations like Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, and North Korea, serve no useful purpose and should be lifted immediately. And the only offensive military action should be reserved for securing evacuation routes for refugees, with the bulk of resources dedicated to extending shelter and both immediate and long term relief to the refugees we accrue through these policies.

There is no utility in punishment. Wanting people who wronged you to suffer isn't a desire for justice, but a desire for revenge. Dangerous people can be stopped from hurting others without locking them in cages or treating them poorly.

I think inheritance of money is bad. It seems to be some agreed upon good, you should leave money and assets to your children. But WTF? This drives inequality, generational wealth accumulates and so does generational poverty. I think the world would be better if it was more use it or lose it, and you couldn't pass it on like that. Or not so much at least.

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.

I think that once it’s viable it would be ok to release a virus which genetically modifies all humans to be more empathetic and to think more critically.

It would be a violation of bodily autonomy, which I generally do believe in, but I think it’s necessary for the productive and positive future of humanity on the single planet which we currently inhabit.

(Yes definitions of intelligence vary, and epigenetics and nurture play a role, but we’re talking statistics and a statistical improvement is still an improvement)

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.

I have two.

There is no such thing as toxic masculinity or toxic femininity. There is only toxic individualism.

Sometimes, you shouldn't be yourself. The person you are might be awful. Bullying and societal pressure correcting you to a norm can be a good thing.

People accused of crimes deserve an equal process which includes an arrest, trial by jury, and punishment defined by law if convicted. Not mob justice or outsourced punishment.

I believe antinatalism is a dire mistake, and the highest thing someone can aspire to be is a parent

Copyright is bad and this includes AI breaking copyright laws. Unfortunately people are too emotionally driven to come to a rational position here.

A universal right to self. Get the trans / gay community, the raw milkers, the anti vaccers, the druggies and the prochoice crowd all on the same page.

The government should make no law demanding or preventing the alteration of any and all, organs protrusions or growths of organic matter attached to and constituting the body of a sentient person not under the court directed care of another.

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.

Religions that seek to dismantle secular democracies should be persecuted, otherwise we're just ending up with a different take on "tolerating the intolerant", and end up like the USA, Hungary, Poland, Russia, et cetera.

Religious freedom should stop at wanting to dismantle secular democracy, just like we don't allow murderous cults, we should also not allow anti-democratic ones.

I was going to say "Copyright is theft" but I see that's basically OPs take, so I'll settle for 'same'.

Buy local goods, even is it cost more... most people will go for cheapest price, even if you're handing your money to warlords and human trafficking.. same argument every time "There will always be ".

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I think peta is probably right to kill all those dogs. Better to be euthanized than to live in a kennel.

People don't choose to be pedophiles. We shouldn't hate them just for existing.

People choose to abuse children, and that should be strongly punished and I think the majority agrees with me on that.

But a non-offending pedophile is someone with a disability and should be treated as such.

I believe it is immoral to own more than one house.

Everything is fair in fiction. No matter how sensitive or dark a topic is, fictional settings are the only place where anything should be allowed.

This does not mean that attacking/defaming people is ok, just that "I don't like this" or "this is insensitive" should never be brought up against the existence of a work of fiction.

I'm not sure if "most" people would disagree with that, but there are too many that believe that fiction should be ruled by (subjective) morale and laws, while I believe it should be the place where anything goes.

Want to know something fun about US parents??

Patents don't really protect new inventions. They give people a right to sue for financial damages and there is no criminal force of law (this is a generalization and I am not a lawyer). So courts don't really go "hey, stop using invention ABC, someone else has a patent on it." They just say "hey, that other guy invented it first, give him some money."

Patents (not other forms of IP) are made to be wildly public so people can invent things on top of previous inventions.

Does it always work like that? No. But it's one facet of US federal law that I find interesting, and a little bit hopeful.

People should be jailed for violating a DNR order.