To be fair, I think people looked at the folks who were into mermaids as outlandish too. “Been around for a long time” doesn’t mean the same thing as “totally accepted socially”.

These things have a lagging indicator. You don’t see these feelings increase when the problems happen - you see them when people lose faith that they’re temporary.

Sure, at the surface level of tweeting back and forth, there is nothing vile. But the very act of using the platform funds an agent of chaos that is doing very real harm, and to ignore that because it is inconvenient is at the most charitable interpretation a selfish and callous act. There are other means of discourse, and those with input that is valuable will follow you.

Maybe, just maybe, if your followers aren’t willing to give up something vile because it’s giving them a dopamine hit, they’re not adding as much value to your life as you think.

https://www.google.com/search?q=samus+aran+nude&sclient=img&udm=2&safe=off

Maybe mark your link as NSFW?

This right here, folks? Is why the concept of “self-documenting code” is nonsense.

I don’t get your point… are you suggesting NOT mind-melding is unethical?

Because it IS dangerous. Trek lore has established that mind melds carry the risk of neurological damage, emotional overload, and Panar Syndrome in the melder.

And even if all of those risks are mitigated, mind-melds are incredibly personal and Vulcans don’t engage in them flippantly.

if I had a hat I would either tip it to you or say my hats off to you

Hat inequity… yet another social ill we need to address.

Nazis and incels need to be dealt with, yes, but the important thing to keep in mind is they are symptomatic of suffering swaths of the population. People don’t just do hate because it’s fun.

We let big businesses and the rich steamroll entire communities and industries, pay lip service to helping people who’ve been damaged by capitalism, and then after the election cycles are over leave their communities to rot. They are desperate and turn to the wrong answers because there aren’t any others.

We allow entertainment and advertising to blast our society with a particular view of what relationship “success” is, and accept mockery of those who cannot thrive in that narrow definition due to social anxiety or other mental issues as fair game. Those men are desperate and turn to the wrong answers because there aren’t any others.

Yes, Nazis and incels are absolutely awful, hateful problems that must be dealt with. And by the time they reach that point, I’d argue they probably can’t be saved. But they don’t fall out of the sky. They come from normal people whose cries for help went unheard, sometimes for decades, or generations. They’re the product of systemic injustices that we can mitigate with outreach programs and getting serious about mitigating the social problems that create the soil they spring from. Stopping them is a necessary band-aid, but the real solution is to address the situations that allow them to thrive in the first place.

There is also a fundamental misunderstanding of Roe vs. Wade in this question.

Roe vs Wade did NOT establish a woman’s bodily autonomy. Roe vs. Wade established that women had a right to an abortion because their existing right to PRIVACY allowed them to consult and make medical decisions without government intervention.

Yes, that is an exceedingly weak and cowardly ruling, and followers of the court warned people for DECADES that it was a weak ruling, and it made it precarious since the beginning.

But that’s also your explanation for why it wouldn’t cover prostitution. Commerce is not covered by the right to privacy.

Don’t let the door hit you on the way out!

Huh… turns out I’m a vampire.

Oh, absolutely. There are good reasons why that wouldn’t be an option.

But those would get in the way of the joke, so I’m choosing to ignore them.

Possibly, but you know who has a history of surviving things that would kill any other crew member and has exhibited at least incredible radiation resistance even in that very same episode?

Also, it’s very un-starfleet to consider one member of the crew more irreplaceable or valuable than any other, even if it is true.

See, the thing about the 1+1+1 is that they can’t all die at ONCE. Even moving at a reasonable clip, let’s say that trolley kills say, one person a second. Two people per second already die anyway, so yes, we’re increasing the mortality rate, but humanity can survive that, and statistically a lot of people wouldn’t end up dying by trolley. It would SUCK that there’s a chance you might wind up on the trolley and dead at any time, but dying is already a natural part of life and it happens to everyone at some point anyway, so there’s nothing inherently STRANGE about adding a trolley death every second.

The 100 reincarnating people will be suffering FOREVER, repeatedly, with no reprieve or redemption, and the real kicker is all the other people in the other lane are dying ANYWAY, just as people always have, so it’s not like you’ve really SAVED them - you’ve just not allowed the mortality rate to increase at the cost of eternal suffering for a few people. Doesn’t seem like a good trade.

It’s a more interesting question if we change it slightly and all of the infinite people are Wolverine, bub.

Is this an “Eventually, Kars stopped thinking” supposition? Because that’s a valid possibility, but we can’t know it for CERTAIN - nobody’s ever been doing anything forever, and chronic pain seems to be painful at least on the timescales of decades…

This assumes the amount of excruciating pain and horror of being run over by a trolley before death is zero, and while I haven’t been run over by a trolley personally, I’d have to imagine it’s not fun.

And I’ll follow up with an apology for my short reaction. It makes perfect sense now.

…it’s a sign that things are going well, sets the mood sets the tone etc it is a form of sexual communication which is necessary, and not unheard of, when people are dating

Those are your words, not mine. If you didn’t MEAN that you should edit your comment.