Chris, as always, take this as an attack on your comments and underlying
logic and not upon you as a person.
As usual, your comment helped me form my responses to not just your
views, but those of others people whose thinking baffles me.
Third, as previously mentioned, a majority once thought the earth to be
flat and the center of the universe; scientific data to the contrary
eventually was accepted by a safe majority of the world's educated
population, but you'll still find people who doubt such basics.
According the consensus of the world's scientists (the peer-reviewed
ones), concerns about sustainability and climate change have the same
legitimacy as the earth being round and being in orbit around the sun.
You can doubt such things, but some views - you need to be prepared -
that you have expressed almost make you sound like a flat-earther.
You're free to have such views, but realize that these statements are
beginning to make you sound crazy.
Fourth, I finally thought of the questions to ask to help you
reason-through some of your comments: honestly, really, you say it's
fine to profit and "make the rich richer" and to hell with the
environment and the poor... that's not a completely unheard of
point-of-view... but would you just as easily say it's fine to make
profit off of slavery? Off catching blacks and making them slaves?
People were willing to kill to defend these practices (and later, to
defend segregation).
How about killing Jews or Catholics or Hispanics or Native Americans for
money?
At various times (and even now) slavery and murder are rationalized as
business activities by thousands upon thousands of your fellow humans
(look up statistics on modern slavery and the forced sex labor industry).
My questions all are driving at this: where do you draw the line,
Chris? Really? Is making money, regardless of the externalities or
direct impacts, really the only variable you consider? You'd stop at
whipping another human? But then, it's fine to let someone starve?
No? Then what about cutting taxes for school lunches? Yes? Probably
most people see such decisions on a spectrum (how objectionable actions
or inactions are ***ends on how proximate the harmful impacts are) --
but where you have data that something does harm (or even MAY cause
harm), don't you reconsider? Do you smoke? Drink and drive? If you
don't, why not? Probably because there's a chance of harm (either death
to you or others or of getting caught)... if so, then you have to agree
that you actually DO allow probabilities of harm to you and others
affect your behavior, right?
Fifth, beyond my suspecting that you would draw the line somewhere on
how you make cash, I humbly suggest that you're not driven solely by
cash. For starters, you actually - it seems to me - enjoy these
exchanges. That's a sign you have some intellectual curiosity, or at
least take pleasure in playing the role of provocateur. You also have
an expressed interest in health and health supplements. Anyway, I'll
stop here. But I think you get my point. I don't really think you mean
that ANYTHING is fine so long as it's profitable - the question only
remains, how the heck are you not convinced that there is sufficient
proof of widespread probable death and misery (more than already exists)
that you don't think some business practices or consumer choices are
silly and short-sighted?
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Originally Posted by spywizard
