Bay 12 Games Forum

Mine watched star wars (Ep1) with me, he was a little scared of some of it but he thought the podraces were amazeballs.

Here police is forbidden from some University campuses, the public ones but not high-schools. Do you have anything similar or something that do not allow to call the cops on a public school?

The smell is the best part. Coffee never tastes as well as it smells. You weird noseless mutant you.

Spoiler: *My lament here, open book (click to show/hide)

I will call out the crowd here that is typically an ideological overlap between environmentalism and anti-anti-abortion.  I can't comprehend the dissonance in ideas between "we have to save the planet for future children" coupled with the implied "but only for the children we want to have".  That's the subtle danger in the pro-choice worldview that breaks my heart - it's the idea that we only have children we want, when we want them, on our own terms.

It pains me to know that there are women who feel they have no choice but to get an abortion, that their life will be so poor if they have a kid they didn't plan for or want right now, or they will be enslaved to their family or don't have the economic life they want.  Life is so much more than that, and it's terrible that society has limited life in those ways.  But that terribleness of society isn't enough, in my mind, to justify us literally choosing who has an opportunity to live and doesn't.  On the flip side, any pressure (physical or, more often, emotional or economic) to get pregnant in the first place is abhorrent.

I have equal ire for the "what about the babies" crowd too, because usually that crowd is also anti-immigration, racist, and generally unkind to other groups. It's like they think that protecting (some) babies makes them righteous despite all the other terrible things they do.  I can't get behind the laws or mere sentiment that says "oh you got an abortion, or support abortions, you should be ashamed and shunned."  No, those women need to be loved.

Basically short story is: all these things roll up into the same core issue of "self first, above all others" and how that worldview implicitly and likely adversely impacts everyone who isn't self.  Putting others first - the unborn, the oppressed woman, the angry teenager, the stranger, the person who you don't understand, the person with different skin color or language or favorite movies, the person who did you harm is damn hard but I think "putting others first" is really the better way that everyone is seeking to get out of society's messes.

It's so easy to say with unfounded confidence "you are wrong!" but it's so so hard to say "even if you are wrong, I will still be kind to you."  And I struggle as much with that as anyone - am I willing to sacrifice being correct (because I do believe in absolute correct/incorrect) to be kind to people?