How marketable would you say your illness was?
Your options would be: begging strangers on the internet for money and going viral, being rich enough to pay out the ass for really good insurance when you were healthy, declaring bankruptcy, and playing Luigi's Mansion.
You're absolutely valid and not overreacting. Unfortunately, depending on where you live, you might not have many other options - but if you can look into other modes of transportation you should.
Driving is dangerous, and not everyone is cut out for it. The great thing about public transit is that it's much safer and less stressful, it doesn't demand focus and attention - and that benefits drivers too, because it means fewer bad drivers will feel like they have to drive and it reduces traffic in general.
It all comes down to what the alternative is. If your alternative to driving is relying on others to drive you places, it'll reduce your independence or be expensive (if you use rideshares). But if the alternative is biking or taking a train, then by all means go for it. There's lots of reasons cars suck, danger, stress, insurance, gas, traffic, pollution, lots of reasons to look into other options.
When he was a serf, they said to him, "Let me find you in this field: I will hang you if I find you in anyone else's field." But now he is a tramp they say to him, "You shall be jailed if I find you in anyone else's field: but I will not give you a field." They say, "You shall be punished if you are caught sleeping outside your shed: but there is no shed." If you say that modern magistracies could never say such mad contradictions, I answer with entire certainty that they do say them. A little while ago two tramps were summoned before a magistrate, charged with sleeping in the open air when they had nowhere else to sleep. But this is not the full fun of the incident. The real fun is that each of them eagerly produced about twopence, to prove that they could have got a bed, but deliberately didn't. To which the policeman replied that twopence would not have got them a bed: that they could not possibly have got a bed: and therefore (argued that thoughtful officer) they ought to be punished for not getting one. The intelligent magistrate was much struck with the argument: and proceeded to imprison these two men for not doing a thing they could not do. But he was careful to explain that if they had sinned needlessly and in wanton lawlessness, they would have left the court without a stain on their characters; but as they could not avoid it, they were very much to blame.
The desperate man to-day can do nothing. For you cannot agree with a maniac who sits on the bench with the straws sticking out of his hair and says, "Procure threepence from nowhere and I will give you leave to do without it."
(GK Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils)
We should try giving the measles virus a MS-13 tattoo.
Yeah if you think Bush was an acceptable choice and not a fascist then you don't really have a leg to stand on with this "commies love gulags" nonsense. You think this El Salvador shit is new? Those of us who were paying attention know that Bush did the same shit, while they did their fair share of torturing alleged "terrorists" with no due process in our own black sites, the worst abuses were conducted in foreign countries like Egypt, when we sent prisoners there knowing full well how they'd be treated. Some of us have been fighting this battle for over 20 years, nice of you to finally wake up and notice now that someone you hate is doing it, but it would be nice if you'd notice when the people you like are doing it too.
It's so stupid when liberals, defending a system with the largest prison population per capita in the world, with indefinite detention without trial, mass surveillance, etc, still try to take the moral high ground on that issue just because the word "gulag" sounds scary and foreign.
You gave zero information to go off of but judging from what I saw from the comments, YDI.
You said about the other person:
You really need to take a look in the mirror and ask yourself why you’re trying so hard to lie about this.
But you were dead wrong about the point being discussed, you kept insisting that their evidence was outdated when they were referring evidence beyond the paper you were talking about. If anything, the other person was remarkably patient with you, and if you were decent you'd own up to having egg on your face and apologize to them. Instead, you reported them for correctly calling out your BS, and are now here whining about a two hour ban.
Personally, I find your whole thing of staying within the letter of "civility" while going "I'm not touching you" and talking down to everyone incredibly annoying, worse than if you just told people to go fuck themselves. If it were up to me I'd issue a permaban, but I don't think we have an abbreviation here for "the mods didn't go far enough."
Electric Slide-stepping of Tariffs
Harlem Shake off the Chains of Capitalist Oppression
Swing (at a fascist)
Cap Vance
I was going to tell you to fuck off because I can't stand talking to people who agree with me and just want to scream at outsiders, but I think this counts as "circle-jerking over how much 'theory' we've read" so that means we're cool 😜
Honestly, I wonder how much of our disagreements do ultimately come down to moral philosophy. I see a lot of people making this comparison and I'd be happy to put aside the present political situation and step back to discuss a higher level of disagreement.
I am a consequentialist, and I would agree, in principle, that the correct decision in the trolley problem is to pull the lever. But that should always come with an extreme amount of disclaimers. There are no shortage of people throughout history who have made justifications for their actions on the basis of "the ends justify the means," but often, they turned out to be wrong. To use an example, torture under the Bush administration was claimed to be justified on the basis of getting useful intelligence in order to save lives. But no such intelligence was ever extracted. Really, it was more motivated by revenge, or a desire to be the sort of cool antihero who does the stuff nobody else will that needs to be done, but "the ends justify the means" served as a rationalization. Another example like that (though perhaps more controversial) is the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The problem with applying the trolley problem to real life is that we are mere human beings of flesh and blood. We have a whole host of cognitive biases that mislead us even when we have the best of intentions. If we give our minds a way to justify things that we know are bad, it gives it an out that allows us to rationalize the irrational and justify the unjustifiable.
There are two practices that are necessary to apply in order to counteract these biases. First, it is necessary to adopt a set of strong moral guidelines based on past experience and historical evidence. Second, it is necessary to regularly practice some form of introspection or meditation in order to better understand where your thoughts and feelings arise from, and how they flow through your mind. Said guidelines do not have to be rigorously adhered to 100% of the time, but they should be respected, and only deviated from after clear, careful consideration, understanding why the guideline exists and why deviation from them is almost always bad.
"Base" consequentialism, where you recognize that pulling the lever in the trolley problem is the correct decision, but simply accept that as a guiding principle, is a terrible moral philosophy, worse than deontology and possibly worse than having completely unexamined moral views. Some of the worst atrocities in history are the result of that sort of "ends justify the means" approach, detached from a set of moral guidelines and detached from humility and self-reflection. I would even say, speaking as a communist, that many of the bad things communists have done in history are a result of that kind of mentality. Following moral rules blindly is preferable to breaking moral rules without first doing the necessary work to be trusted with breaking them.
There's plenty more I could say on the topic but people always complain about my long posts so I'd better cut myself off there.
War profiteers. If you work for a company like Raytheon or Lockheed Martin then you are doing an incredible amount of harm to the world and I have even less respect than I have for people in the military. These companies are constantly looking to fuel conflicts, destabilize, and pump all sorts of weapons into every corner of the globe. These people are the true scum of the earth, they are among the worst people who have ever lived.
Hey now, don't forget about draft dodgers
Fucking bootlicker.