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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: April 12th, 2024

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  • If you think your dad was sent to fight against the Nazis for ideological opposition, i have bad news for you. Maybe he personally fought out of that motivation, but must countries at the time were either fascist themselves or on the edge to fascism.

    If you look at the US there was the ongoing genocide against native Americans, the racial segregation, eugenics, despicable human experimentation carried out on minorities, concentration camps for Japanese during WW2… Even the pledge to the flag in the schools was something Hitler admired and copied. Until the German Nazis became unpopular in the US the pledge to the flag with done with the “Bellamy Salute” that is the same as the Nazi salute. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellamy_salute

    )

    The truth is, they never left.

    What is different though is that after WW2 it was understood which social problems, in particular fucking over the lower and middle class, create the breeding ground for fascism to be successful. Since the 1980s with Thatcher and Reagan and then the neoliberal wave over Europe, we had 40 years of deliberately empowering fascism. Now they reap what they sew.



  • Adding other elements changes the taste,

    This is not how chemistry works at all.

    To start with, fatty acids also need Oxygen because of the COOH and OH group of the glycerin in fat. They are not hydrocarbons. You know what also is just made of Carbon, Oxygen and Hydrogen? Hundreds of thousands of molecules. All sugars and carbohydrates. If you allow for Nitrogen too, you could cover most molecules found in biological life.

    None of this has any bearing on how difficult or complicated it is to synthesize these from more basic molecules like CO2 or H2.





  • Again looking at the map of Germany as well as the article from the BBC stating an increase of Microplastic by over 1000% compared to the baseline shows that fireworks are a very strong additional pollutant.

    People in the US drive their cars all the time. During rush hour more cars are emitting in traffic jams than are driving to a football match. Yet we see these huge spikes in pollution when there is fireworks.

    Think about it: Everything form a firewokr that does not turn into CO2 will stay dispersed in the air or fall down as debris. This is most of it, as the op pointed out himself the GHGs to be only a small part. Meanwhile for cars the vast vast vast majority of its emissions in quantitative terms are CO2 emissions, with particles, NOX and Microplastics being much less. They also pose a massive problem, but because of hundreds of millions of cars on the road every day.




  • Yes they are. Somebody extracted the ressources. Somebody processed them into materials. Now someone put them together into the pyrotechniques and finally someone set it off.

    All of this labor and capital usage went into creating a short display of pretty lights and bangs, of which afterwards nothing but smoke and memories remain. This is the purest consumption in the economic sense.

    Compare that with people using that labor to produce cars instead. Those cars take years before needing renewal and they can be used productively, so they are investments in the economic sense.

    Finally lets take clothes, while also consumption they address an immediate human need and are reuseable for some time, so while they are also consumption they are quite different form fireworks.



  • Tuesday coming after Monday is an arbitrary convention. In the same way that for natural numbers in the decimal system we called the number after one two and the one after that three. But we could have also called them three, two, one, four…

    And yes i claim that believing there to be no god is a form of faith.

    Think about it this way: God promises the believers who do good and ask forgiveness for their sins paradise and threatens the disbelievers with eternal hellfire. This is reiterated throughout history multiple times by prominent figures and the believe in god is the standard around the world. So from a rational risk minimizing point of view believing in God is the safer thing to do. Especially with how little religious practice Christianity requires compared to Judaism or Islam.

    But to get to your core argument: Flying Squid claimed Jesus like in the bible did not exist because it is impossible for him to have existed in this way.

    That is like saying you know for a fact Dragons never existed because there is no Dragons today. Now replace Dragon with Dinosaur and you see why this line of argumentation is problematic from a scientific methodological point of view.

    So i think we agree that what is consistent with scientific methodology and what are matters of believes need to be separated in argumentation.


  • the burden of proof lies with the one who speaks, not the one who denies) is the obligation on a party in a dispute to provide sufficient warrant for its position.

    Flying Squid said it is impossible what is described in the bible. So he or you if you take his side are the one burdened with proof. In fact the bible provides a very straightforward reasoning. Jesus was granted the power to do wonders by God so people would recognize him as a messenger of God and listen to him spreading the message of God.

    You can say you dont believe in that. But it is not a proof of it not having happened. Especially as a lot of people who lived at the time said otherwise.


  • Where did i say that it should be scientifically proven? I merely reject the idea that it is scientifically disproven or to claim that what has no scientific proof does not exist. This kind of thinking has rejected microorganisms, atoms, gravity and many other nowadays established things. Heck people acknowledge it to be perfectly reasonable to theorize about the existence of dark matter that is unobservable to us and holding the universe together.

    It is simply unscientifc to claim to have “facts” against what is written in the scriptures as they describe events from 1400 to 5000 years ago. Not believing in them is perfectly valid, but it needs to be acknowledged as a matter of believe, a matter of faith and is in such in no way more valid than the believe that a scripture is true.




  • Yes they do. They believe, without evidence, that no god exists. This is specifically different from agnostics, who say that they do not know. So atheism is a form of faith, because they choose to believe something about the nature of the divine, even if that is the absence of any divine.

    Interestingly there is also religious atheism for instance in some forms of Hinduism and Buddhism.

    I always find it silly, when atheists proclaim to “believe in science” violating the very principles of scientific research by proclaiming something as factual and absolute they have no evidence for. If someone is true to scientific principles he’ll say he does not know hence he is an agnostic. An Atheist however is always a person of faith, even if many people fight tooth and nail to deny it. Which brings me back to what i wrote here somewhere earlier in the comment chain that my impression is most atheists to be traumatized by bad religious practice or actors abusing the religion to harm them, and not having found a healthier way to address their trauma yet.