How about for 4 minutes?

There’s a YouTuber called The Rules Lawyer, and I thought at first this post was about him. It sounds like something he would do: “Every +1 Matters!”

I had this idea for a wizard who was kind of crazy and believed he was the king of a nation that doesn’t exist. He would see the rest of the party as his nobility and task them with enforcing laws he made up on the spot. In combat, he would use “control” type magic like paralysis and counterspells to lock down his enemies, pronounce guilty verdicts, and issue death sentences which his noble companions would carry out. I don’t know if the spell list in D&D would support this kind of gameplay, though.

I’d love to see insurance companies get taken down a notch, but what you’re saying isn’t nearly as simple as you think. People regularly get tens of thousands of dollars into debt for lifesaving care, even with insurance. Those without it can go hundreds of thousands or even millions in the hole - I’ve personally known people in that situation. I certainly agree that hospitals are partly to blame, but the whole healthcare system is built around insurance paying most of the cost. This never would have happened if insurance didn’t exist. It’s a captive market. The only way doctors, hospitals, and pharmacists would unite in not accepting insurance was if all insurance companies disappeared. There’s just too much money on the table otherwise.

Very true. There’s some benefit where the business can get a “package deal” of sorts which makes it cheaper than buying individual policies, but it’s still a shell game.

Insurance companies make money by indirectly extorting customers, be they individuals or businesses, through pricing schemes with healthcare providers. The American healthcare system is designed and priced around people having insurance, as you’ve noticed. This leads to insanely high bills for what should be simple things. An ambulance ride often costs over $1,000 without insurance, for example. In a nutshell, they’ve created a system where they are both the problem and the solution. Why don’t they start behaving more ethically? Well, from a money standpoint, why would you become less corrupt when you can collect more money by being corrupt?

Changing insurance providers, or even just certain coverage choices, isn’t easy. We have what are called “enrollment periods” in the US when you can do this, and the only other times are under major life changes such as marriage or having a child. As another user noted, most people get insurance through their employer. The company (usually) pays the lion’s share of the premiums; otherwise, the plans would be completely out of reach to employees. My plan would be four times as expensive to me if I was paying for it out of pocket.

As a result, starting something like what you want on a national level would be extraordinarily expensive, hard to compete with established players, and likely legally troublesome. Don’t get me wrong, we need reform pretty badly, but those reasons are why it hasn’t really taken off.

It would have been better if Russia had abided by the Minsk II agreement. Better yet, if the Budapest memorandum had been enforced and Russia not invaded its sovereign neighbor to begin with. But power is the only language Russia speaks.

I love my WFRP campaign. I’m playing a noble’s servant who got sent on a dangerous quest by his lord to “man him up a little,” and he wound up getting mixed up with a party is complete nutcase. The rules have an odd kind of crunch to them - there’s tons of details for combat, but my GM says there’s basically no encounter design guidelines, for example. Still, it’s a great time and I can’t recommend it enough.

If the problem is churches taking too much money from people, how is taxing them going to change that? Won’t that just encourage them to take more?

Talking like that could get you arrested, your friends and family detained, and your online communities shut down. Don’t do that to the people you care about.

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.

I mean, you can’t even tell me what would justify October 7th, so I’m not sure even you understand your own ideology. It comes across to me like Christians who reframe the entire world through their interpretation of the Bible, then get angry at others for questioning it. In this case, it comes from a furious inability to accept that Hamas committed unjustifiable atrocities because that would collapse your entire worldview. You’re probably backing off now because you’re afraid of having this precious opinion challenged any more than it already has been.

But hey, I can’t force you to reply anymore. I enjoyed this conversation, and I hope you have a good rest of the week.

I should have added them before. Now, would you like to answer the question, or was October 7th not justified?

So what specific circumstances would justify raping a bunch of women, killing dozens of children, and shooting up a concert full of people who were not an immediate threat to you? And how do they not also justify 9/11?

So just give it to me straight, do you think it’s okay to shoot up a concert where nobody could reasonably be considered a threat to you? Consider that in isolation. It’s a simple question yes or no question. I’ll read your thing about “resistance ideology” if you can answer that.

I found this article, which specifically states:

Under international law the right to resist excludes recourse to violence against civilians.

That sounds to me like Hamas isn’t allowed to kill civilians. Do I understand that correctly?

I don’t really know what “resistance ideology” is. Are otherwise-heinous actions acceptable if they come from a weaker party? Is this that power-plus-prejudice thing again?

Ukraine’s capabilities wouldn’t change whether Russia’s invasion was unjust. If they were a corrupt nation run by neo-Nazis (they aren’t) and Russia wanted to draw attention to it, then they’d be justified in attacking Ukraine.

Yes, Operation Cyclone is a fact, but Al-Qaeda literally said that they didn’t receive US funding. They have zero reason to lie about that. Why are you so angry about it?

Morality is the entire point of the discussion. If morals don’t matter, then it shouldn’t matter how many innocent people die at the hands of Hamas - or the IDF. Both sides can do whatever they want and nobody gets to complain about what they do. That includes you, me, and everyone else on Lemmy. If morals do matter, then we need to think about the motivations and actions of every party involved.

Hamas and Hezbollah are both oppressive, extremist regimes internationally recognized as terrorist groups who are intent on destroying Israel. This is literally genocide. Since Iran is funding and arming them, Iran is complicit in their attacks on Israel. Iran is also internationally known as a state sponsor of terror. These are indisputable facts.

Iran only gets attacked by Israel when they start fights with Israel. Their motivation is simply the destruction of a nation that doesn’t provoke them. The recent strikes were a response to Iran’s sponsor of murderous terrorist groups attacking Israel - namely, Iran messed around and found out.

If morals don’t matter, why are you so upset about Israel killing civilians? If morals do matter, how do you feel about Hamas expelling the previous government of Gaza in a civil war, using the entire Gaza strip as a human shield, raping and killing over a thousand innocent people, kidnapping over two hundred of them, and firing thousands of indiscriminate rockets into Israel?

If raping and murdering people is an acceptable way to bring attention to issues, then the Russian invasion of Ukraine under the pretense of eliminating anti-Russian bias and removing Nazi influence in their government. You and I both know that’s a ridiculous statement, but it follows logically from yours.