Baby steps.

All private ownership of land is deeply morally suspect. Nobody made that valley, someone was violent enough to make a claim stick. Usually several people, over a long period.

I got made fun of for crying when my grandfather died. Over 30 years ago. So I stopped.

Not this quarter it isn’t! (Until it suddenly is.)

You may just be having trouble with the idea that people can reasonably and seriously see the world from a point of view other than your own.

Or it’s all a bit!

Who can say? No matter how I answer it’s not really evidence, you can draw a 2x2 decision matrix here for both answers and both possibilities. All four outcomes are plausible. Choose the answer that makes you happiest.

People make real friends online. Who they don’t know in person. You’d be telling your child to toughen up and get new friends.

If I included a self destruct button beside the AC controls and claimed that it was driver error that was the problem, how credible would that be?

Bad drivers and shitty “self driving” are how the cars are unsafe.

No matter how it happens if they crash more often or have worse outcomes when they do, then they’re less safe.

… Why would I care if they miss me?

Why would I care about their opinions at all? I’m pretty sure we care about each other’s opinions about equally as is.

I bought fuel at Costco yesterday, half the pumps were empty.

I don’t believe in a higher power, of course we get to judge shit like this. What higher breed of human am I meant to be listening to?! It’s just us humans here. We do the judging.

I think they’re being disingenuous, because the government has been spying on all of us via end runs around the rules like “five eyes” for decades. If they want to go all CIA on you they just ask an ally to do it, then return the favor and spy on the people of other governments for them. All legal and above board, it’s just “intelligence sharing”.

And the NSA isn’t even barred from monitoring you in the fist place.

I think it’s somewhat naive to assume anything isn’t being spied on by the NSA. They don’t have a history of being picky.

I don’t say slurs. It’s not nice.

That doesn’t mean I think trying to force others to behave like I do is moral or productive. (Or nice. A bit coercive.)

This should not be hard to understand. I also don’t drink, and would not ban booze.

I think it’s especially harmful; it’s tantamount to pretending things don’t happen. You need to show people being terrible in fiction for it to be a full portrayal of the human condition. It’s part of what we were, it’s part of what we are, and if we have any hope of making it not part of what we will be that’s not going to come about by insisting we don’t talk about it.

No means no, Microsoft.

“Go ahead and act how I disagree with and see what happens to you” is an indirect threat.

And this is coming from someone who does not use slurs, and does not think others should. But trying to ban them is futile; the hate still exists and will be expressed otherwise even if you succeed.

There are SO MANY things that people shouldn’t do that it’s wrong to stop them from doing.

There are 2 broad categories of social contract. “Everything which is not forbidden is allowed”, and “Everything which is not allowed is forbidden”. Most modern societies hew to the former.

Demanding a justification for use of a word is the latter. Demanding a justification for it’s ban is the former.

“Does one really have to ban the use of the word “retard” to make a community diverse and interesting?” is a more reasonable question. And since you just used the word, you should be against it’s blanket ban.

The hard truth of it is we can’t reduce the social contract down to mechanistic rules. It fails at both allowing reasonable speech and stopping unreasonable people. You can’t encode “don’t be a jerk” into rules, it takes judgement to see if someone is being disruptive to a community.

Any word that expresses a negative connotation about a group becomes a slur over time. And then a new word is chosen, which becomes a slur eventually as well. I think trying to make ideas impossible to say by banning the words used to say them is futile.