Can you tell me which sentence in that statement clearly says, “I support sending weapons to Israel”? Or are you making a lot of inferences based on you a priori beliefs?

You’re not proving your point.

Hope that helps.

You aren’t making your case here.

It wouldn’t have mattered how she voted on this bill to anyone that thinks she isn’t far enough left, or left in the correct way, because that amendment wouldn’t have eliminated all Israel weapons from the bill. As you know. Voted to stop sending some weapons to Israel? That’s not enough, therefore she supports genocide. Didn’t vote to stop sending some weapons to Israel? She supports genocide. It’s ‘heads I win, tails you lose’.

She knew that, in the end, the bill would get passed despite her nay vote.

Okay, she also knew that the amendment wouldn’t get passed, so there’s no harm in voting against it, right? You’re applying two different standards of logic here. If you look at it through the lens of, “AOC wants to eliminate all military funding to Israel”, then the votes are ideologically consistent; the first fails to meet the goal, so gets voted down, the second vote–the overall military appropriation–funds Israel, and so also gets voted down.

You’re setting up an unfalsifiable argument, where there’s no condition that would lead you to believe that she’s opposed to the genocide in Palestine.

And what is your belief based on? What falsifiable evidence do you have that it’s actually correct, factually true?

In other words, how do you know?

Because Jesus Christ rose from the dead. OP is a Christian and believes that.

Any evidence for that, aside from a book that doesn’t cite sources? Look mate, I can believe that Harry Potter really defeated He Who Shall Not Be Named and saved the muggle world from his domination, but does that make it right? Would that be a positive thing to base all of my life on?

This is the same as a Christian telling an atheist that their gay relationship is wrong.

…And yet, they do that all the time, don’t they? Not only that, but they try to pass laws preventing them from happening. Or to prevent trans people from accessing appropriate healthcare. Or to ensure that women don’t have rights to their own bodies.

No, it doesn’t matter to the universe. Morality can still matter to you. This is the idea that existentialism is built around: you have to make choices for yourself.

Define “cheating”.

I looked up an online answer key for the last test I took. The test was take-home and open book, and the teacher repeatedly said that we could use ANY resource to complete the test. I spent hours scouring the course material trying to find some of the answers, and they just weren’t there; the course simply didn’t cover some areas of the test at all. Or even mention them. It turned out that there were several version of the course that I took, and the teach taught one version, but used the test for a different version.

Is that “cheating”? I don’t know. I did all the parts that I could without looking online, but I’m still not happy that I needed to look online in order to complete a course ‘successfully’.

There’s nothing particularly wrong with lust, sexual attraction, desire for connection, etc. It’s all part of simply being human. Why would you assume that the teachings of the Christian bible are correct, not in just this matter, but any other? Why not any other scripture? Buddhists, for instance, would say that any desire prevents you from progressing spiritually. Satanists (me!) would say that no desire is inherently wrong, and that it’s how the desire is expressed, and it’s whether it overrides someone else’s autonomy that makes a thing right or wrong.

I don’t view paying a prostitute for sexual services as being inherently wrong. It’s wrong if you’ve agreed to sexual fidelity with another person (terms and conditions apply), and it’s wrong if you’re using a prostitute that has been forced into sexual labor. But if you haven’t promised a partner (or partners) that you will be sexually faithful to them, and the prostitute is in the field willingly–or, at least as willingly as anyone that works at any job–then it’s not really any more wrong than, say, paying someone to make a meal for you when you’re hungry. Labor is labor, regardless of the nature of the work.

The first step to overcoming this ‘problem’ is therapy. You want a sexual and emotional connection, and you feel like you’re unable to find it otherwise. You should find a licensed psychotherapist–not a member of the clergy, not a life coach–and work on why you have problems finding that.

Why do you believe that it does?

Look mate, we’re a cosmic blip. On the scale of the universe, we don’t even register. We’re born, we live, we die, and on the scale of how long the universe has existed, it’s not even a blink. The universe is about 13,900,000,000 years old. The first single-cell organisms emerged about 3,500,000,000 years ago. Humans, in our current form, have only existed for a mere 300,000 years. Our sun will turn into a red giant in about 5,000,000,000 years, which will sterilize the surface of the earth, but it won’t matter to humans, because we will have evolved into an entirely different species and almost certainly have gone completely extinct billions of years before that happens.

NOTHING we do matters to the universe. There is nothing we can do that will affect the course of the entire universe. Any belief to the contrary is simply terror management. So how could one moral code, in the grand scheme of the universe, matter more than any other?

What makes you believe, aside from your attempts to manage your terror of non-existence, that any of your morality matters at all?

Why do you assume that a god is necessary for morality? What led you to this conclusion? What falsifiable evidence do you have?

Removed by mod

I’ve been wearing VFFs for, uh, fifteen years or so? Something like that? I think it might be a little more, I’m not sure now. I’ve also got a pair of VivoBarefoot hiking boots, and the Bellville MiniMil rough-out boots that end up being my utility shoes. The only times I don’t wear minimalist footwear is on a bicycle (I used SPD pedals), and on a motorcycle (I have Sidi Vortice and Mag-1 boots). I always wear socks with my boots, and always Injinji socks with my VFFs.

I’ve gotten so used to them that regular shoes feel very weird and uncomfortable.

Yeah, but a lot of insurance plans also have coverage maximums.

You’d be fine, aside from the attorney’s fees for declaring bankruptcy.

…Oh, and probably losing your housing.

I say, it’s your money, make the choice yourself. I’d rather donate time and money to an org like Food Not Bombs where they can use the same amount of money to help more people. But, let’s face it, I’m too busy these days to find the time to volunteer. So for me, if I have money–and I usually don’t–I’ll give them what I feel like I can.

You don’t have to listen to it loud…

Kind of. It’s still not nearly as effective as Firefox with uBlock and a few other extensions. The downside is that some sites are just broken on Firefox, and blocking ads, etc. makes a relative few sites unusable. Which, yeah, 99.999% of the time I’m fine with. Until it’s something I need to do for my day job.

Just 1" PTFE domes. Nothing super weird.

I mean, more weird than subdermal implants.

Indeed. It runs smack into the problem of falsifiability.

I had to get up and walk down the hallway within an hour of waking up from a major spine surgery. I swear I could feel the muscles that they’d stitched back together trying to tear themselves apart through the stitches

That was 20-odd years ago; I look forward to never repeating that.

Uh. Shit.

And I’m going to have to get a tractor to power a snowblower pretty soon here…