u/Patneu

How would billions upon billions of Federation citizens see themselves, knowing that all of it and every single one of them basically only exists because a single one of Starfleet's own Captains made the spontaneous decision, self-admittedly based on nothing but a guess, to allow for the genocide (omnicide, even) of an entire sapient pre-warp species using stolen Federation technology, against pretty much all of the core values of Starfleet and the Federation?

And that the Federation simply covered it up again, based on the flimsy excuse of "we don't talk about time travel shenanigans", and still offered Captain Pike a promotion afterwards and took no disciplinary action whatsoever, because his very questionable choice just so happened to turn out well for humanity.

Would they really essentially just treat that as an interesting bit of trivia about the prehistory of Earth, shrug and move on with their lives, as the Admiral seemed to believe, who apparently didn't think much of how lucky he was to not actually have to make that decision? Or would it possibly have caused some kind of controversy or even an existential crisis?

How would this event be taught and classified in schools and Starfleet Academy? Would people think that Pike did the right thing or see him in a much more critical light?

A question for PLers who say stuff like "consent to sex is consent to pregnancy":

What do you think is the point of consent? Why would someone care to ask another person for their consent and why would the other person want to be asked for their consent?

And how does your answer square with your demand that people who explicitly reject it need to carry a pregnancy to term?

When Eve goes after the people who killed her father when she was a child, they're threatening the Ruska Roma that trained her that there would be "war" if they don't stop her.

And the Ruska Roma are basically treating this rival organization as a serious threat, with which they wouldn't want to break truce under any circumstances whatsoever.

But the thing is: they essentially just proved, by the mere act of making this threat and their apparent need to make it, in the first place, that they cannot even take out a single rogue agent of the Ruska Roma – without any support or allies – on their own.

So why the hell should they be taken seriously as a threat to the entire organization?

PLers usually like to claim that an absolutely nonsensical interpretation of "responsibility" for a pregnancy should apply to women, because they had (presumably) consensual sex and they "knew the risks", so they have to "deal with the consequences".

You are demanding that a woman who engaged in an activity that carries an about 2-5% risk of causing a pregnancy in a random sexual encounter – which can be significantly higher but never even reaches 25% even at peak fertility while actively trying to get pregnant, and can also be significantly lower with use of proper protection, like <0.1% with perfect condom use – has to carry a resulting pregnancy to term, no matter what.

Because you claim that even these ridiculously low chances of "making the unborn dependent on her" should result in an absolute obligation to completely subordinate a woman's mental and physical health and their need to avoid harm, suffering and risks to her life under the unborn's alleged need to be "taken care of".

Which begs the question:

If these ridiculously low chances of causing a pregnancy are enough to essentially condemn a woman into involuntary servitude despite her not even having committed any illegal act whatsoever in order to get pregnant – then why should these same odds of inflicting a woman with all the harm, suffering and risks to her life by having sex with her and impregnating her, "knowing the risks", not be enough to condemn a man to prison time and compensation for the damages inflicted on a woman?

Where is the public outcry of the PL movement, demanding for men to "take responsibility" for the "recklessness" of their indulging in a perfectly legal activity for pleasure or intimacy or companionship resulting in a risk coming to pass that they have no direct control over whatsoever?

Why is the silence on this so deafening that it's not even recognizable as a topic of public debate?

When PLers here are asked about why they don't vote for politicians and parties, that

• support policies that actually reduce abortions, like better sex education or access to contraception

• support policies that actually help children, like free school lunch, or at least don't actively get them killed, like the destruction of USAID

• don't support regressive, and often religion based, policies against the rights of women, the LGBTQ+ community, migrants and other marginalized groups

you often pay lip service and claim that you do support all these things, but that voting against abortion would just be more important.

But the thing is: that doesn't make sense!

This shouldn't be a compromise you have to make, if banning abortion is not a regressive policy itself or even a door opener for other regressive policies. Voting against abortion should not require you to compromise basically every other moral and legal position you claim to hold. So why does it?

And why should anyone believe that the PL movement or you personally are actually in favor of all these things, if you still compromise them every single time, instead of seriously reconsidering this one singular position that allegedly doesn't match all the rest?

Why is voting PL practically at odds with every other policy that's actually supposed to save or improve people's lives?

Mecha Man's real identity was a secret, right? So did Robert's dad have a life insurance policy for himself or for Mecha Man?

If it was for himself, why would any insurance company payout if he died in the suit? There's no way superhero work would be covered for an ordinary guy with no powers. What even would've been the public story of how he had died? Did Robert have to make something up?

Or are there insurance agencies that specifically offer life insurance policies for superheroes, so that Mecha Man was the one to be covered? But Mecha Man isn't even a legal entity, and there's no way an ordinary day job could pay the presumably astronomical premiums. Apparently the family did have some wealth already, but then wouldn't it have made more sense to just let the money work and put the gains into a trust fund for Robert?

Why did some of the men hidden in the Trojan Horse drown when the flood came?

Was there any significance to why they couldn't bury the Horse in the sand above the flood line? They should've known where it was very well if they had been at the same beach for 10 years at that point.

And according to Sinon, it was a gift to Athena, and not like Poseidon so that it would've made sense to make it look like it was supposed to be taken by the sea.

Speaking of Sinon, what did he think was supposed to be the plan behind the Horse, what was his role to play in it, and why did they leave him behind?

As Odysseus said he didn't tell him the truth so he couldn't give the secret away for fear of death. So what did he think was supposed to happen?

Did he think he was to guard the Horse or something, because he put on his armor and ran towards the Horse when the Trojans came? But that'd seem obviously futile.

Or was he supposed to be an envoy, to inform the Trojans of the "peace offering"? But then they shouldn't have killed him, right?

Because Odysseus quite apparently expected the Trojans to respect the laws of the gods that he himself had decided to break, as that would've been the reason for them to take the "gift" to Athena's temple in the city, to begin with.

Like, he's the protagonist, so you should be able to put yourself in his shoes, right? But I really find myself downright detached from his choices sometimes (when you can only choose between bad and horrible).

Because they're so blatantly obviously the wrong call, and not only does the game justify them anyway and blames the team for them as if the consequences were an exclusive result of their moral failures instead of bad management, but even has *them* argue to use them as precedent for further wrong decisions.

Like when the game forces you to kick a member off the team although Blazer and Robert set the team up for failure with the way they went about it, which you gotta watch like a car crash in slow motion you're not allowed to avoid, and then has the team argue to kick off Invisigal as well.

And what makes it even worse, is the gameplay basically punishes you for the consequences of these bad decisions you weren't allowed to avoid, because it's not exactly enjoyable to do worse in a game for reasons you couldn't control and having to begrudgingly suffer through them.

I haven't finished the game yet, much less replayed it to try other options, yet it still seems to me like there would've been no scenario where any of them really would've taken responsibility for this massive screw up, despite it being so painfully obvious.

Like, they have a team of villains there who are reluctantly trying to better themselves and become heroes instead, but have a hard time accepting their new role. And instead of encouraging them and trying to foster a sense of belonging, or offering incentives to show that it's worth trying, they issue a threat of kicking them out if they don't immediately perform, and tell them they can't come in last.

Which completely foreseeably led to Invisigal almost giving up and returning to her villain life because she thought she could never amount to anything, everyone turning on each other to sabotage everyone else trying to get them to last place instead of actually doing a good job themselves, and a lot of them being pissed off at Robert for actually going through with this.

But instead of recognizing that this was a mistake from the start and that they failed them, and maybe reconsidering their approach, Robert just gives them a speech where he essentially frames all that happened as an exclusive result of the team's own moral failures – which is obviously true to an extent but also what would've been Robert's job to handle, in the first place – and Blazer treats his scolding as a wholesome and inspiring moment.

So, are they really just that dense, believing that whatever ill-fitting approach they got into their heads must always be right, because they're heroes so they know better?

In the beginning of the movie, there are a lot of Buzz Lightyear toys stranded on an island, coming from a wrecked container that probably fell off some ship.

One of them woke up, did yet again not realize that he's a toy, so he woke the others to explore the unknown planet and try to contact Star Command.

Now, he probably assumed that the container was some kind of spaceship that had crash landed and it'd not be weird for him to assemble the other Space Rangers present to find a solution to their situation together.

But why were none of them even remotely surprised that not only are they all Space Rangers, but they are all... Buzz? No identity crisis, no suspicions of some evil masterplan behind that. They just accepted it as if that's normal.

What kind of dangerous situation would he possibly be able to protect them from that they couldn't handle on their own, when they were just supposed to cross a terrace to open a door?

In the end, they got into 4 somewhat problematic situations along the way, with 2 of them not solved but rather caused by Nagisa's presence, and only 1 being somewhat dangerous to the girls themselves, which Nagisa wasn't even around for, as they sent him away as a distraction.

(1) That insecure rich kid who was pestering them because he wanted to hook up with Nagisa, which wouldn't have happened in the first place if he wasn't there, and wasn't really dangerous but just slightly annoying.

(2) Some older guys who were harassing the girls but obviously would've been no actual threat to them, even if taking them out might have been more noticeable than they would've preferred, but Yada easily scared them away with a Yakuza coin she got from Irina Sensei (note: the automod apparently doesn't like what everyone in the show actually calls her).

(3) Some actual Yakuza member whose attention the rich kid accidentally caught by doing a stupid dance trying to impress Nagisa, who was only ever a threat to the rich kid, and Okano only bothered to quickly take him out so he could serve as a distraction for (4) some random resort employee guarding the door they were supposed to open.

So in the end, they made all that noise about Nagisa being supposed to protect them, only to send him away as a distraction for basically the entire mission, and they even found it acceptable to send Kayano, the smallest girl of the group, halfway back all on her own in order to fetch him so he would vaguely lend a "male hand" with the guard, that eventually wasn't needed either, when they were almost done.

Nagisa himself even acknowledged that they did everything on their own anyway and complained about why he had to dress up then. Now maybe they were really just looking for a flimsy excuse to put Nagisa in a cute dress, as teasing him about how girly he is was a common theme.

Except it was Karasuma Sensei who originally claimed that the mission was "too dangerous for girls", for some reason, and I don't see what reason he would've had to humor such shenanigans given the situation, so he actually should've had something in mind how a single boy in disguise could've possibly been helpful here, but I don't see what it is?

This is a hypothetical about the value of human life, the moral principle that it should be protected, and the contradiction of exposing it to arbitrary risks of death to sustain another.

In this scenario, newborn children have a chance to become practically immortal, and we'll presume that this will be an absolute positive for them and won't cause any side effects other than the ones described. The alternative is for them to live out whatever their normal lifespan would be.

But in order for this to happen, someone else needs to experience all the same harm, suffering and most importantly risk to their life caused by carrying a pregnancy to term again, over the same span of time. The individual effects will be just as arbitrary and unforeseeable as those of an actual pregnancy, and if possible can be medically treated in the same ways, including an abortion of the process with the same side effects as the abortion of a pregnancy.

The person required to go through this process is the child's father. We'll presume that he will be available and will have the same chances of successfully completing the process as a woman in the same physical and psychological condition who's carrying a pregnancy to term.

(1) Should the father be legally compelled, under threat of punishment equivalent to an abortion ban, for him or anyone who helps him to abort it, to start this process on behalf of his child?

(2) Should the father be legally compelled, under threat of punishment equivalent to an abortion ban, for him or anyone who helps him to abort it, to complete this process on behalf of his child, once he started it?

(3) Should the father be legally compelled, under threat of punishment equivalent to an abortion ban, for him or anyone who helps him to abort it, to complete this process on behalf of his child, presuming that the process starts naturally?

(4) Would your answers stay the same if the risks for the father were higher or the benefits for the child lower? If so, where would you draw the line?

Please keep in mind that if any of your answers are yes, then the same would apply to the child if they're having a child of their own one day and their immortality will not negate the effects.

Kara's backstory as seen in the movie seems to imply that nobody on Krypton even knew what Kryptonite was before the planet got destroyed, so it wouldn't exactly be common knowledge, especially not among other alien races, right? And did any Kryptonians ever actually try to live under a green sun, so it would be known that it would be harmful or even deadly to them?

And even if any of that was feasibly acquirable knowledge, why would some random criminal bother to learn about it, considering that there are only like two known Kryptonians total left in existence and there's no reason for him to expect he'd ever meet them? He even said it himself that he never had the chance to test his Kryptonite weapons on anyone before. So what did he make them for to begin with?

Let's assume you are granted one wish when it comes to abortion, and these are the options you get to pick from:

(1) People who consider terminating any pregnancy you think they shouldn't will be immediately provided with the most convincing possible argument not to do that, if there's anything at all that could convince them, and with all the resources they need to make their choice without pressure, but they do retain the choice and legal right to make it.

(2) Abortion will be legally banned in all the cases you think it should be, but everyone's views on that and their material conditions remain unchanged and they still retain the choice to try and terminate their pregnancy anyway.

(3) People will become physically unable to terminate any pregnancy that you think they shouldn't and also unable to do anything that they know would particularly endanger it, but their views on that and their material conditions remain unchanged.

(4) People who consider terminating any pregnancy you think they shouldn't will immediately lose any desire to do so for the duration of their pregnancy, but their views on that before and afterwards and their material conditions will remain unchanged.

Which of these options would you choose and what do you think are the moral implications of choosing it over any of the others (like what do you think it says about you as a person)?

So, this would be mostly for PLers, I guess, but maybe some religious PCers too.

How is your alleged source of "objective morality", whatever it may be, in any objectively observable way distinguishable from subjective morality?

If you are citing any kind of god, higher power, sacred scripture, prophet, etc., then how can its existence and more importantly its moral judgement be objectively verified?

If such cannot be directly verified, how are any interpretations of or allegations as to such an authority's judgement, made/relayed by some kind of human authority, distinguishable from their own subjective opinion or a position they hold for subjective reasons?

What judgment do you claim has said objective moral authority made when it comes to abortion and how can this be verified? How is said authority's objective morality outright denied by a huge number of people? If no such judgement has been made, of what relevance is such an objective moral authority to the abortion debate?

Also, if such an objective moral authority is supposed to be distinguishable from anyone's subjective moral judgment, including yours I presume, what does that practically look like? Do you believe that it has ever made any judgement that directly goes against your own subjective moral judgement?

By which I don't mean that it forbids you from doing anything you may want to do. But rather, has this authority ever declared anything to be moral or immoral while you subjectively firmly and genuinely believe it to be otherwise? And what conclusions would you draw from that?

What I mean is, as we learn later in the show, that his "threat" to destroy Earth at the end of the school year is not actually something he wants to do, but something that will just inevitably happen to him.

And the way it is going to happen kinda makes me question that they really thought trying to kill him would be a good idea, especially with the later revelation that the chance of it actually happening is much smaller than originally believed.

Because, if I remember correctly, they basically installed a biological particle collider producing antimatter inside of his body, which would trigger a massive explosion upon eventually becoming unstable. So, what exactly makes them think that just killing the very same body that hosts all this potentially unstable antimatter wouldn't trigger the same explosion?

Now, if there was about a 100% chance of it happening anyway, then sure, they might as well take the possibly at least slightly better chance of doing something rather than nothing and try to assassinate him. But the revelation that they already managed to stabilize him, and that the remaining chance of doom was now about 0.1% or something like that, should make them seriously reconsider if the unpredictable risk that is added to that, by going for the assassination anyway, is really still worth it.