We live in a world populated in the enormous majority by mindless tribals. Of course their rituals are idiotic.

Educational videos are fine, but what we need is a cull.

You mean he broke down when one minute he was excited about his awesome job and the next thousands of people were screaming at him for no reason.

He's not history's first innocent victim to be pressured into making a false confession. I hope you're proud of the side you've chosen.

Cards Against Humanity. The game that made me yell, "Damn it! I played my Child Abuse card too early!"

I hated looking at that popsicle. It's too cold! Get it away from me!

This is the point of thought experiments. They're not supposed to be unsolvable zen koans. They're supposed to help you identify and examine the fundamentals of your whatever philosophical model for a given topic. This one is obviously doing its job, because when you can construct statements like 'perfect certainty makes inaction as culpable as action' then you already have a richer understanding of ethics than say 95% of the population.

Many people give the opposite answer to yours; they don't think you should take an innocent life deliberately, even if it is for a greater good. Now, are these stupid people? Yes. And you'll find more and more of them when you recast the question in increasingly uncomfortable terms: Should you shove a fat man in front of the train to slow it down, knowing the five will then have time to escape? Should a doctor harvest the vital organs of a perfectly healthy patient to save five otherwise healthy people who happen to be in need of various organ transplants?

Real world solutions and complications to these questions are irrelevant. Petri dishes don't exist in nature but you don't slap them out of biologists hands and yell at them to do real science in the real world. And isn't the fact that so many people would decline to assassinate baby Hitler informative in itself?

There was a 300 player sequel with 30 countries (with 6 to 15 people controlling each country) and 6 separate alien factions, plus 5 megacorporations, 3 competing media organizations, and the pope.

I did this a while ago, but different dice have different densities so with the materials available to me I was only able to get a portion of them to float.

You should follow my example and, having discovered that some are balanced and some are not, put them all back in the same jar and ultimately learn nothing.

At first I found it irritating, then I found I was able to tolerate it. Upvote.

*promote

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

It's a shame there's nowhere on earth where the laws are written by human beings.

I'll echo the video again and say you only have to read the qur'an. If you think, for example, 'unbelievers deserve to be tortured forever in the afterlife' is a belief that could be held by a good person, then I just don't know how to find common ground.

People are deceived into defending muslims because they don't like the kind of people they see attacking them. Obviously we don't like Donald Trump, obviously we don't like bible-thumping pastors and their qur'an burning parties, and islam doesn't have to be a race for racists to hate muslims.

None of that bigotry goes any way whatsoever toward excusing actual islamic doctrine. If you examine it objectively and without apology you will find you despise it.

Fear isn't a reasonable reaction to individual muslims, at least not if you meet them in a non-islamic country, but hate certainly is. I don't typically say of people I hate that I'm interested in peaceful coexistence or protecting them from radicalisation.

You'll notice I didn't say germans, I said nazis. If you want to exempt someone on the basis that they weren't really signed up to the movement, that's fine, but they're then no longer properly a part of the analogy.

In any case, probably the most generous thing that can be said of the 'naive nazis' is that if they didn't know the people they called jews - judaism is no more a race than islam - were being murdered, they merely thought they were being robbed of everything they owned, used as slave labour, and forcibly resettled. That's alright then.

You see, Penn is flat wrong when he says most people are good. Most people are stupid, and stupid people follow social norms, and social norms are, surprise, for the most part pro-social. It's a comforting illusion.

The friendly nazi baker who loves his family, always has a treat for the neighbourhood children, and never invaded anyone gets no pass from me. He's a fucking nazi. Most muslims don't blow people up or throw homosexuals off buildings, doesn't matter, they're still muslims.

Terrorism is a moronic bogeyman and I spread hate every day. Any idea can be used to corrupt people, that's not important. What is important is whether the idea in question is corrupt in itself; Penn says this one is, I agree with him, and that being so I say the people who hold to it deserve to be hated.

National Socialism is an idea.

Nazis are a people.

You're allowed to hate an idea; you're not allowed to hate people for their ideas.

Is it not infuriating to other liberals that we've reached the point where the only opposition to the most backward and repressive popular ideology in the world today has to come from right-wing nationalists?

It should be perfectly clear that if you want to call yourself a liberal then you're obliged to oppose islam and resist the spread of islam into the civilised west.

I don't want to support people like this, but the mainstream left's complete betrayal of liberal values leaves those of us who still hold to those values with few allies.