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 see anyone that could. Even a weakened US is likely to have nukes, and a fair few of them, a hypothetical invader that is not Canada or Mexico (which would have to deal with having a smaller population and a much worse economy, or a much smaller population) has to deal with crossing an ocean and therefore building an extremely large naval capability. And finally, whoever it is would have to occupy a huge area with a population of over 300 million.

For how long though? The issue with detecting AI generated stuff, Id imagine, is that a picture contains a finite amount of information, especially a digital one. These things have been improving relatively quickly, and I cant think of any fundamental reason why one could not eventually create images where every pixel is as it would be if that image were real, or at least close enough that detection is not even theoretically possible if you dont have some actual proof that the event depicted couldnt have happened. We may not be there yet, but the closer we get to it, the more prone to error and therefore less useful any detection algorithm must be.

Quite the exaggerated headline from the look of it.

I mean, might it not be so much the actual conditions themselves so much as the perception of the future state of those conditions? I imagine bad conditions that one is already used to, that one perceives as potentially getting somewhat better or at least not that much different, feel different than relatively good but tenuous conditions that one expects to lose with time. Losing things often feels worse than simply not having them in the first place after all.

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.

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).

x3 is an emoticon, its like xD but more furry as the 3 is like a cat’s mouth shape kinda. Sorta like the difference between :) and :3

In my family growing up, pancakes for dinner was a common enough thing, but my father constantly insisted that if you’re having them for lunch or dinner they’re called flapjacks instead and only pancakes when made for breakfast. And every time we had them I’d mess with him by pretending to forget and asking him if he was making pancakes that night.

I’ve generally heard the origin explained as coming from an offshoot of the general scifi community in the late 70s to early 80. There are a lot of animal people in sci fi (things like aliens designed after animal people, or stories about animals given human traits and characteristics, or people being spliced with animal dna), and fantasy stuff which has a related audience, and some people particularly liked that trope.

I mean, the current borders of the US do include some former foreign states and land previously owned by others, that were taken over in the past, Hawaii for example. Does that not make it an empire, or does that stop counting after a century or so?

While I agree that its unlikely for him to go out that way, failed attempts dont make the chance zero. The people trying that only have to get lucky once, he has to avoid being unlucky every time.