This is what I tell myself every time I find out the hard way what documented parts of Visual Basic didn’t make it into VBScript.

Don’t take non-OTC drugs without consulting a physician first. You could really screw yourself up with some of them, the hard stuff especially. The potential ups of doing them aren’t worth the likely losses.

People who take aspirin or ibuprofen take it for a specific purpose, and when they no longer need it, they stop. With things like steroids, heroin, cocaine, and Adderall (if they don’t have specific conditions like ADHD), people frequently end up chasing a horizon that only gets further away the harder they run to catch it. It’s a miserable existence and it causes them, and often their friends and loved ones, endless pain.

You deserve the best from yourself. That includes self-care. You’re more than your flaws and disorders, whatever they may be. Don’t make those an excuse to wreck yourself in pursuit of a goal that probably isn’t real.

Nope! You don’t have to pay a cent to the Catholic Church to receive communion.

The majority of my friends are online. The internet has connected me with people who broaden my horizons, help me learn interesting and important things, and grow as a person. You don’t need to know someone in-person for that to happen anymore. IRL friendships will always be better, all other things being equal, but they’re not the only solution.

7 Days to Die has a terrible problem with the devs not knowing what they want to do with the game. All they know is that the players are doing it wrong.

To be fair, the sidebar says this is for open-ended and thought-provoking questions. But I can see this place becoming Debate Bro Central if the mods don’t add a rule like “Don’t ask a question if you just want to argue with people over it.”

Saint Benedict Joseph Labre followed a similar path. Though he was from a wealthy family, he strove to live a monastic life. When he was turned down twice, he resorted to becoming a homeless pilgrim who traveled between European holy sites until he died of starvation. Notably, though, he was said to avoid people who were too fond of him and practically sought out opportunities to be downtrodden.

Capitalism isn’t the problem. Any economy run by human beings is going to have cronyism.

Here’s the article. According to the story, there were two people panhandling and using drugs; they were asked to leave. One threw a rock at the employee’s car window, shattering it, and then threatened to shoot him. The video also says the person was shot because he lunged at the employee. I hope the truth comes out and the situation is handled appropriately.

So what did he do, then? How can you substantiate it?

Usually when I hear people described as “Christ-like,” it’s used to demote how much power and influence that person has over others - for example, “Donald Trump is a Christ-like figure among the alt-right.” Someone going around and calling themselves that would come across as strange at best.

paranoid and psychotic tendencies

If he was simply insane, then how would he have performed any of his miracles? Or are you going to throw out the parts of the Bible you don’t like and keep the ones that support your position?

Also, I’ve dealt with, and am friends with, plenty of people with what you would call “paranoid and psychotic tendencies.” That you would accuse someone who walked this earth more than 1,900 years ago of having them suggests you either have supreme medical and historical knowledge. Perhaps you’ve spoken with him so you can make an accurate diagnosis?

in which he claims to be God

If he is, then that explains everything he said and did in the Bible. It’s pretty obvious that if he’s God that he would want people to follow him.

This comes off to me as incredibly paranoid

He was talking about Judas, who was stealing money from the ministry and later sold Jesus out for a handful of silver. Calling that out isn’t paranoia.

I’m apparently not the only one who thought Christ seemed mad

If he was just a madman and the people he was “curing” of “demons” were also madmen, those “cures” wouldn’t have happened. No person with schizophrenia has ever been cured of this disorder simply because another person with schizophrenia touched them. I’ve had the disorder for about seven years at this point; I wish it were that simple.

I agree with you that following Jesus doesn’t make a lot of sense unless you’re worshipping him. His entire message is based on his own divinity. If he was just a prophet, then if he was a good one, he wouldn’t be saying things like “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30).

I especially like that, despite the fact that you’re the supposed hero, every shot of your hand shows what appears to be a scaly monster’s hand. It makes you wonder who - or what - you really are…

A monster? Don’t be like that, bro.

What do you want, Mr. Ghost? Do you want us to stop making new technology and simply use what already exists, consuming more power and time than is necessary? Do you not want people to be free to buy what they want with their own money? The singularity people are stupid, but don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

When I actually need to concentrate, I usually stop listening to music. When I want to get into a flow state and it isn’t 100% critical I focus, it could be just about anything. This remix of the Call of Duty World at War Black Cats theme is awesome for that purpose.

I mean, capitalism is silent on the matter as well.

Besides the fact that 3/4 of it is emotional pornography, it’s a trigger for my PTSD.

North Korea: Such a great nation, there’s no need or ability to ever leave.

1. I’m glad we agree on October 7th not being justified.
2. In this example, not only is Hamas holding their own people hostage, they’re doing so while lobbing rockets and mortars at Israel, even during “ceasefires.” Comparing war to a criminal trial, the court is not being actively shot at and bombed by the people it is putting on trial. To get people to the situation where they can be put on trial, law enforcement has to take certain risks to ensure the suspects can be brought to court as safely as possible. In the vast majority of cases where the suspect is an active gunman popping off shots at the police, this isn’t possible.
3. and 4. Then it seems we both agree that it isn’t easy or even possible to calculate out exactly what ratio of civilians are acceptable losses. I respect your proportionality argument, but as long as Hamas is armed and in power, they will continue to threaten Israel. As I’ve already explained, if Israel’s defenses such as the Iron Dome failed, then Hamas’s rocket attacks would suddenly become a far more dire threat.
4. It seems as though the ideal solution is to remove the elements of both Hamas’s and Israel’s government that want nothing more than to kill indiscriminately so the remainders and replacements can come to peaceful terms. That’s something I can agree with, but until that’s done, there’s going to be a devastating war.
5. Does Hamas have mechanisms in place to punish people who wrongly kill or rape Israeli civilians? And how easy is it to delineate which single provocation started which flare-up in this decades-long ethnic and religious conflict?
6. I’ve addressed this in a previous comment, but this is more or less what Hamas is doing. Rather than establishing military bases within Gaza with minimal civilian contacts, they’re holing up soldiers and materiel inside schools and hospitals. Then the international community holds Israel responsible for Hamas’s decision to sacrifice their own people.
7. Yes, they are fighting defensively, just like Israel is. As long as Hamas puts missile sites on hospitals and fires at Israel, some civilian deaths are inevitable. If Hamas doesn’t want this to happen, they should establish proper military bases.

I forgot to address this from your other comment. If there truly are pointless killings of civilians being carried out by the IDF, those responsible should be punished. I’d be more than happy to see a third-party investigation into Israel’s war effort performed by a neutral, disinterested party. If such a thing were to happen and, for example, certain people made it their goal to kill as many Palestinian civilians as possible, then those people need to be dealt with because they compromise the entire integrity of the IDF while wasting human life. Just like Hamas.

One-off intelligence failures, such as the one time I could find that Israeli hostages were accidentally killed, do not an illegitimate state nor genocide make.

We can do de-radicalization when Hamas decides that watching over 200 of its people die every day isn’t worth however many Jews were killed since October 7th. They started this war, and they should have understood the consequences of breaching the border of a highly militarized society before they did so. Now, instead of paying the price, they’re deflecting all blame to their sworn enemy and basking in neutral-if-not-positive press. If Hamas is truly incapable of coming to such a conclusion, they have no right to exist; not only should there be pressure on Israel and Gaza to declare a truce, but Hamas must be dissolved for the sake of the people of Gaza.

If you think there is any cognitive dissonance here, you’re wrong. My position is simply that Israel has a right to exist and to defend itself from Hamas. That doesn’t mean they get to kill people willy-nilly, that would make them no different from Hamas. You don’t seem to understand that. If Hamas wants to limit civilian casualties in the war that they started, they’re more than free to either stop putting soldiers and materiel in hospitals and schools, or simply surrender. This crisis is self-manufactured.

And again, you are misunderstanding what an execution is. If Israel actually was on a genocidal rampage (like Hamas wants to do), then Gaza would have been nothing but a bloodstain months ago. There would have been zero humanitarian aid reaching Gaza. You stated in an answer to one of my questions that it would be acceptable for Ukraine to fire at soldiers who are using civilians as human shields as long as the goal wasn’t to kill those civilians. And I would agree. Ukraine has as much a right to exist and defend itself from Russia as Israel has a right to exist and defend itself from Hamas. But when it comes to the situation in Gaza, you suddenly change your mind. The situation is the same - there’s a ratio of 3-4:1 civilians to Hamas soldiers killed - but the main difference is where it’s happening. Yes, it’s tragic every time a civilian dies. I agree with you wholeheartedly there. But that doesn’t mean throwing them up like a smokescreen makes Hamas immune to return fire in the war that they started.

No, actually, I am not okay with governments lying about their motives for a war. That’s one reason I despise Russia. But again, if Israel’s goal was to simply wipe out the Gaza strip, everyone there would have been turned to paste months ago. Israel is suspected to have nukes, after all. Instead, they have been warning people ahead of their strikes, and those people died because Hamas refused to evacuate them so they could use them as propaganda pawns in the war that they started.

But why can’t you put a precise number? For one, you can’t value every soldier’s life the exact same way. A guy with an RPG and a stash of a hundred rockets blowing up everything he sees needs to be removed much more swiftly than some dude in the rear lines who mostly just stands around. As another example, taking down a military commander who is ordering the civilians to endure the bombing that Hamas brought upon them would bring the war closer to an end than devoting the same resources to killing said dude standing around doing guard duty. If a hundred civilians have to die in an operation (because Hamas is using them as pawns in the war that they started), then it makes far more sense for the operation to kill Rocket Man or Major Major Major Major than Mr. Guard Duty. Your question is comparing apples to oranges. Additionally, I don’t question the raw casualty counts that the Gaza Health Ministry puts out, I question the accuracy of their estimates of civilians vs. soldiers killed. As they are under the jurisdiction of Hamas, they have every incentive to manipulate those numbers in particular.

We’ll cross that bridge when we get there. Again, this goes back to one of the questions I asked you. You stated that it would be acceptable to kill the gunmen before they started shooting innocent people, and then bent over backwards to paint the situation in as much of an anti-Israel light as possible like you don’t actually believe what you just said. If given the opportunity, Hamas will repeat October 7th. Israel should absolutely fortify the border and load up the Iron Dome to prevent this - and confront the military that’s on their doorstep.

Ultimately, this is an exploitable crisis for (what went ignored in your post) Bibi to escape active criminal charges as he maintains immunity in his position of power. Sure, arrest Bibi for his part in radicalizing Palestine and whatever needless casualties are happening. Netanyahu too. But they aren’t the only ones exploiting this crisis.

At this point, a nuke is uncalled for. I mean why not? Because the simple fact is the situation isn’t that severe yet. Nobody opposing Israel at the moment - Gaza, Hamas, whoever you want to call out - has a nuke. That would be an imminent and existential threat to Israel which would need to be addressed immediately. As far as I’m concerned, that’s the only situation in which nukes are permissible with the risk of MAD. But right now, Hamas has an opportunity to surrender every single day. This crisis could end at any moment, if Hamas simply gave up the war that they started. Your statements imply that it’s okay for Israel to get attacked indiscriminately as long as seemingly fewer civilians are killed in the process.

That’s quite not happening when they’re bombing these densely-populated buildings, though. You’re right, they’re using rockets instead. And they’re in positions that can’t be attacked directly, as I already said. And if some malfunction or sabotage happens to the Iron Dome, as unlikely as that might be, all those missile bases will suddenly become a much more serious threat. In that case, how will the people who cried that these installations should never have been targeted react as rockets fall into Israeli territory en masse for the first time in years? And even if that doesn’t happen, Israel still only reports a success rate of 90% for the Iron Dome while they’ve been sitting patiently as Hamas has launched tens of thousands of missiles at them over not just this war, but longer than a decade. Resting on your laurels is a sure way to fail eventually.

That does nothing in terms of permitting Hamas to regroup. It just ensures that civilians are radicalized in greater numbers. Allowing their attacks to continue unimpeded will only embolden Hamas. If lying down and taking it was a feasible strategy, intelligence failures aside, then October 7th wouldn’t have happened because Hamas wouldn’t have wanted to attack.

Nobody said anything about, “Let jews die.” Only one component of your answer actually deals with the imminent problem of rockets raining down on Israel, and it’s just to sit there and take it. No other nation on Earth would be expected to sit around and let their genocidal neighbors indiscriminately launch explosives at their cities, regardless of the defenses in place.

Hamas didn’t attack by tunnels. There are also incredibly easy methods of detecting underground tunnel networks via sonar systems that are already employed around the world. Are you talking about ground-penetrating radar? Because this source says that its maximum depth is around 30 meters and could be as low as 4 feet, while [Hamas routinely digs their tunnels at depths of 50 meters.(https://www.reuters.com/graphics/ISRAEL-PALESTINIANS/GAZA-TUNNELS/gkvldmzorvb/) Maybe it would be feasible if they buried the detector element deep within the soil (which isn’t something I’m sure is possible), but based on this info, it isn’t the guaranteed solution you imply it is.

Israel hasn’t even been able to support a 2 state solution, after all. If this were true, Gaza and the West Bank would not exist. They would have been wiped out. Israel has been extremely effective in war ever since the 1950s.